The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  The trouble at the denazification court began when my mother had to type up the reports and the prosecutor asked her to change things. He said she had mistaken some of the testimony and that what the Jewish woman had actually said was that the gynaecologist was always angry and hostile towards her. My mother was to put down that the Jewish woman was in fear of her life that the gynaecologist might suspect that she was Jewish.

  My mother refused to write any of that. She said she had taken very careful notes, they could check her handwriting. The prosecutor then said she could lose her job if she did not comply, he would accuse her of trying to help a former Nazi. When she continued to refuse, he asked her if she was taking bribes from people. It was only then that she realized what was happening. She had seen packets of cigarettes and other things like cognac and tins of meat in the prosecutor’s office at various times, so she began to understand why some people got the authorization to work and others didn’t.

  She decided not to work under these conditions any longer. She handed in a letter of resignation, stating that she could not go along with it. The letter caused an instant crisis. Before she had time to clear her desk and leave the office, the prosecutor, Willenberger, asked her to withdraw the letter. He said he would make it easy for her, all she had to say was that she had made a mistake and he would allow the gynaecologist to have his name put forward for authorization. Then he changed his mind and said he would bring her before the court herself and say that she had been friendly with the gynaecologist, that they had been seen together. He would see to it that she would be blacklisted.

  My mother says she didn’t need to make life so difficult for herself all the time, but she could not get the gynaecologist out of her mind, the way he sat there quietly without getting angry. The letter of resignation came to the attention of the American administrators who were responsible for the denazification courts, so they came and asked my mother if she had written this letter freely, without any pressure from anyone. They asked her if she wanted to take the letter back. My mother explained why she had come to this decision and says she felt very stupid, sitting there with a number of officers smoking and offering her cigarettes, asking her why she was so eager to give up such a good job. They couldn’t believe anyone had a conscience in Germany and wanted to find out what was really behind the letter. It was only after a few days, when they realized that she was not going to change her mind, that they began to believe her.

  The problem was that the letter was on file now. They must have thought she would contact the lieutenant from Vermont and tell him what had happened, so they were forced to take the letter seriously. They made more attempts to change her mind. The prosecutor asked her if there was anything she needed, things he could provide for her and her family. He even mentioned the use of a car. He was kind one minute and then turned aggressive. She was afraid and decided to leave immediately.

  She thought she was safe back in Kempen, but the prosecutor, Willenberger, came after her, appearing on her doorstep, begging her to withdraw the letter. She could only assume that he had now lost his job as a result. It was going to be on her conscience that Willenberger was blacklisted. He explained that he had a wife and family and that she was making them all destitute with her grand, untouchable conscience. And what did she do during the Nazi years, why was she suddenly so worried about her conscience when she could live through the whole of the Third Reich and not ever have to write a letter like that before?

  My mother says she wishes she could have had the courage to write that letter during the Nazi times, that she might have been more like Sophie Scholl and protested openly. But then she would not be alive now. And now is the time to reshape your conscience, she says. Maybe it was the silent negative that she and her family had kept in their heads that was finding its expression at last in words. At some point you stop being silent. She says it’s even more difficult to resist now than it ever was under the Nazis, because there is more to lose. It’s easier than ever to say it doesn’t really matter all that much now. Just getting rid of every Swastika in the world is never going to be enough. Just because the Nazis are gone, doesn’t mean that injustice is gone.

  She would not change her mind. Willenberger kept following her around the town and people in Kempen must have thought he was a former fiancé whom she didn’t want to marry any more. He sat behind her in church. He whispered that she had made him desperate and that if she didn’t change her mind, he would do something really drastic, something she would not like to be responsible for. He even pulled out an envelope and said he could let her have a nice little sum of money.

  ‘You cannot sting me,’ she said aloud outside the church.

  She could see the anger in his eyes and thought he was about to attack her. She says a woman knows when her life is in danger because you can smell dead leaves in the air and you can feel your legs going weak and lose all the colour in your face. She thought she had already met her killer. Very often when they found a woman’s body, they first assumed she was a prostitute. It was something that Willenberger said to her then, that convinced her that he had been the true Nazi himself all along.

  ‘You would not have lasted long,’ he said. She took a few steps back. She was afraid to turn around and stood there until he finally left.

  By this time, my mother had already applied for a visa to Ireland. She wanted to get as far away as possible. She was afraid to stay in her home town any longer. She didn’t want to tell her sisters or her aunt any of these threats. Onkel Gerd knew and made sure she was always accompanied when going out. The weeks that she had to wait were agonizing. But then the visa came at last and the house was full of excitement. Even when she was leaving on the train and had embraced her family, even when she was still sitting on the train, wiping her tears, she knew she had still not got away, because Willenberger came after her.

  My mother says she had never been so afraid in her life, seeing him smile from behind his newspaper. But there comes a moment, she says, when you have been so afraid for such a long time, that you don’t care any more. Suddenly you become light-headed with courage. The train was full with people going into Krefeld and Düsseldorf, so she just suddenly spoke up to the whole carriage.

  ‘I want you to leave me in peace,’ she said in a raised voice. Everybody in the carriage looked around and stared at Willenberger sitting opposite her, until he eventually had to move away.

  Sometimes my mother still thinks he will come after her in Dublin, that he will suddenly knock on the door. For years she had nightmares about men outside the house, sitting in a car, waiting for her to come out with her children. She had escaped to Ireland without losing her conscience. And then she laughs and says she would have made a terrible lawyer.

  When she first arrived in Ireland, she felt so free. She vowed to go on her pilgrimage to Lough Derg. She had a job as a governess and was collected in Shannon by Mister and Missis Bradley who owned a public house and a shop on the main street in Ballymahon, in the middle of Ireland. They had three boys. She remembers the welcome that Mister Bradley gave her at the airport, clasping her hand with both of his, then taking her suitcase from her. They brought her to the car and made her sit in the front seat, so that she would see as much as possible along the journey. My mother thought they would go straight to Ballymahon and she was anxious to start working right away, but that was not how the Irish did things, she says, and the Bradleys first brought her to Ennis, where they stayed in a hotel and had a party. Mister Bradley knew lots of people in Ennis and invited them all to come for a drink. She says she could not understand why the Irish wanted to celebrate before she had even done any work. It was a poor country, a country that had not been bombed during the war but looked much more destroyed and starving than Germany. The party lasted until late in the evening with people toasting her and singing songs and a priest explaining the rules of hurling to her, even though she didn’t understand how you could play with sticks and not hurt each other, so the pr
iest told her that hurling was a substitute for war, like all sport and singing.

  In Ballymahon, everybody in the town was talking about her and coming up to have a look for themselves as if they had never seen clothes like hers before, only in the films. Groups of children came to the public house to see her coming out and when she smiled at them, they were shy and held on to each other. She felt like a famous visitor. She was invited to dinner every evening, unlike the other people working in the pub and around the house. The Bradleys had made a lot of money during the war when Mister Bradley stored gallons of whiskey and boxes of tea which had become scarce. He had made so much profit selling these during the rationing, that even the Bank of Ireland came to borrow money from him because they were broke. But it wasn’t long before my mother learned what Ireland was really like and why there was so much poverty that could not be explained by bombs.

  Next door there was a small cottage where the door was always open. The little Bradley boys would run past and shout ‘Dirty, Dirty.’ She told them to stop, but they would not listen to her. It made no difference, they kept on shouting ‘Dirty, Dirty.’

  My mother went to the door of the cottage and looked inside. It was dark and smoky because of the small windows. It was true that the place was dirty. She couldn’t believe that humans could live like this. There was not a single piece of furniture in the house, not even a chair, and the man sat on the earth floor beside the fire with his wife. My mother says his naked legs could be seen coming out under his ragged trousers like a skeleton. They never seemed to come out of the house. They must have been ashamed to be seen in the town and never moved from the spot where they were sitting.

  My mother spoke to the Bradleys and told them what was happening. Mister Bradley laughed. Missis Bradley said the tailor and his wife were dirty people, living in squalor. My mother was not able to persuade them to control the boys, so she tried something else. The next time they shouted ‘dirty’ in the door, she decided to go in and apologize for them. She stepped inside the cottage and got the smell of poverty coming up from the two old people. She apologized for the children’s behaviour and said she hoped they were not offended. The old people looked up and said nothing, because they didn’t understand English. They could only speak Irish and the Bradley boys started laughing. Even Mister and Missis Bradley found it funny and my mother says the whole town was laughing at the idea of a German woman trying to apologize to the poor tailor and his wife when they only spoke Irish.

  My mother then learned her first words so that she could go into the house and greet them in their own language. She found out their names as they were known to other Irish speakers around the town. Páraic Mháirtín and Sinéad gan cainte. The tailor even got up from the ground to come to the door and shake her hand. She says it felt like a thin black leather glove. It was soft and bony, with no weight at all left in it, and hardly any warmth. She can never forget shaking hands with somebody so poor and so destitute, but still so much alive.

  She started taking some spare food from the house and bringing it to the cottage and the tailor thanked her in Irish. Missis Bradley didn’t like the food going out of the house, but she didn’t say anything except that she wanted her children to grow up clean. Everybody was afraid of being like the tailor and she wanted my mother to give the boys a few words of German instead of Irish.

  She continued to bring food to the cottage from time to time under her coat, like she did in Germany. But unlike the Americans in Wiesbaden, the Bradleys got annoyed because my mother went too far. One day she asked if she could give away an old coat belonging to Mister Bradley. They were throwing it out onto the rubbish tip to be burned, an old brown torn coat which she cleaned up. She sewed on new buttons and fixed the sleeves, then brought it over to the tailor. After a few days, Mister Bradley came into the house in a rage, saying that he could not understand the Germans any more, because he walked along the street and saw the dirty, filthy Gaelic tailor standing at the door of his little cottage wearing his old coat. He was shocked to see what he would look like if he hadn’t made all that money selling whiskey and tea. Missis Bradley said it was an outrage and that people in the town would mistake the tailor for her husband. After that, my mother decided it was best to leave her work with that family and moved to Dublin, where she met my father. But even when Missis Bradley brought her to the bus to say goodbye, my mother noticed that maybe she had begun to change a tiny bit, because she said my mother had done something that nobody else in the town was able to get away with. She wished her good luck and said she would be missed.

  My father puts his arm around my mother and praises the way she stood up for the Irish language, for the people dying out and going into extinction. He says the Irish people began to pretend they didn’t belong to the same country as the tailor and his wife. They made a foreign language out of their own tongue and that allowed them to become racist against their own people. He smiles and says my mother shook hands with a dead language and brought it back to life again.

  Sixteen

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

  When my father was studying engineering in Dublin and all the students were sitting in a lecture room in UCD waiting for the professor one day, there was an argument about Britain and Ireland, about Irish soldiers fighting for the Queen, about flags and languages, about a United Ireland and about Irish neutrality. Everybody was throwing everything they had into the debate and speaking at the same time. Some of them had their feet up on the desks, smoking cigarettes and saying it was a waste of time speaking about anything other than women and whiskey and emigration. My father called them cowards. He was good at mathematics and able to think sideways, so he took them all on and kept them silent for a moment with his ideas.

  He told the other students that the Irish had to stop running away and start thinking with their heads in future. Some of them agreed and said the only thing holding Ireland back was the situation in the North of Ireland and the fact that the post-boxes were still red up there. Some said it could only be solved with blood. Others said it was pointless and that the heroes of 1916 died for nothing, just to change the colour of the post-boxes in the south to green. The students with their feet up said the problem was that Irish women never took off their clothes until they were married. And then came the big storm in the lecture room, when somebody made a remark about women wearing black shawls over their heads in Ireland and how that was what kept the Irish going backwards when all the women in England and France were now wearing headscarves and stockings instead.

  Everybody laughed except my father. His mother, Mary Francis, wore a shawl. She was photographed in her shawl along with two other women also wearing shawls on the street in Leap, West Cork, by the famous photographer, Father Browne. My father got up very suddenly from where he was sitting. He picked up the steel chair and flung it across the room. He didn’t tell anyone why he had decided to do this and they didn’t know what secret thing in his head made him so mad. They must have thought the chair had conducted a massive charge of electrical energy, like a Van de Graaff generator underneath him. My father must have been surprised himself by the amount of noise the chair made clattering across the wooden floor. I don’t know where he got the idea from, but he picked up another chair and threatened to kill everyone with it. The students took their feet down off the desks and fled with their backs up against the window, begging for mercy.

  My father stood there with a wild look in his eyes. I’ve seen it many times myself when his eyes are like hard brown full-stops inside his round glasses, when his mouth is tight with rage and his ears are on fire. He’s small and has a limp, but he gets so serious and so angry at the sound of his own words that everybody is afraid of what he might do. The students knew that he could be overpowered easily and that he was not very good at fighting, even with a chair in his hands. But he was good at losing his temper and not telling anyone why. So they began to talk to him and to ask him what it was that made him so
furious. They were dumbfounded to find out that it was the Irish shawl and not something much more important like asking Britain for war reparations or keeping Irish people at home and stopping them from emigrating and working for Britain. They said there was no offence intended to him or to anyone in Ireland who still wore shawls, and slowly my father let the chair down again and everybody shook hands. Somebody picked up the chair lying on the floor, and after that, they were careful because they said my father was sensitive and had a short fuse and could lose his temper at the drop of a hat.

  I didn’t know about any of this at the time when I picked up a chair one day and threw it at my mother. There was an argument in the kitchen one morning about going out without clearing the table and I got angry with her. I couldn’t get her to agree with me, so I picked up a chair to kill her. I didn’t really want to hurt her, just to frighten her. She said she had been frightened by worse things than chairs, so I threw it across the floor of the kitchen. She didn’t pick it up or say much, except that flying chairs would never make her change her mind, no more than flying words would ever persuade anyone to agree with me. She said she would leave the chair where it landed. For ever. It was going to be like a monument to the uselessness of anger. Everybody passing by would know by the chair lying on its side that somebody had failed to convince the world. The flying chair of lost arguments, she called it. So I picked it up again. We shook hands and it was all over. But I realized that I had become like my father inside. He invented the idea of picking up chairs because people were not listening, and the only thing that would make them take notice was the sight of something unusual, like a chair upside down in the air with nobody sitting on it. I could no longer avoid being like my father, no more than Stefan can avoid being his. I am a chair-thrower for Ireland and I wonder what I will do next.