Every Single Minute

by Hugo Hamilton

  At one point, Úna was driving out to the west and she realized you could switch off your own emotions like a car radio. It was like hearing nothing. Like being underwater. She discovered how to live her own life and pursue her own happiness instead of worrying about her family.

  It was a bit of a surprise arriving at the church in ruins because there was so little to see. All there was left was the broken steeple, as if the war had only happened the other day. We went in and saw the shell of the church from inside, only the mosaic ceiling in one part still intact, quite well preserved, with a few cracks running through it. We saw pictures taken of the church before the war when it was still standing and nobody could have had any idea how the place would look in ruins after the war. Imagine not knowing, she said. And right beside the ruins was the new church, built as a replacement, a modern octagonal shape made up of small blue windows or blue stained pieces of glass, like a million blue squares with light coming through. So the whole church was full of blue light. It was like being inside a blue vase, no matter what the weather was like outside it was always full of blue light, blue across the floor, blue across the benches, blue across our faces.

  At the door, there was a basket of apples, so you could give a donation to the church and take an apple. There was a drawing of the Madonna that she wanted to see, an oval shape of a mother wrapped around a child, keeping it warm, drawn in charcoal on the back of a street map of Stalingrad during the war.

  At the candle-stand there was a small steel container attached to a chain, with a slot for the money at the top. The coins made a clinking sound as I threw them in. The tray had real candles, naked flame, not like in some churches where you pay for an electric light flickering, low voltage. So I lit a candle for her brother, Jimmy. Then I placed it into an empty space on the tray and we looked at it for a while.

  I asked her was there anyone else? Did she want to light one for her parents maybe?

  One for your mother and father, I said.

  No, she said.

  She wanted no candle lit for her mother and father, absolutely not, only her brother. It was hopeless trying to persuade her to forgive, because you could never forgive something that was done to another person, she said, only something that was done to yourself.

  I’m not entitled to forgive what was done to my brother, she said.

  Her brother was only a child at the time, she said. He saw what was going on. He told her what happened, in letters. He wrote to her, putting it all down on paper as though he could give the memory away to her for safe-keeping. He wrote telling her what he remembered, because she was the writer in the family and she would know what to do with the information. She carried that information with her all over the world, the story of her brother became part of her own story. And even though it was all told in her books, it was still impossible for him to get rid of the noise that remained inside his head. Ever since he was a small boy, he carried that sound like a companion walking beside him, whispering in his ear. What he witnessed would never stop, even though his mother and father were both long gone now. No matter how many letters he wrote, the memory would always belong to him.

  He was at the mercy, she said.

  He heard his mother was calling for help. He heard the sound of his father’s fist. He heard the sound of his mother’s face. He heard the love leaving his mother at night and never coming back, there was nothing he could do to help her. And then he hid himself in a drawer. He was not much more than four years old at the time and he was trying to get away from what he heard, they found him asleep in the drawer of the wardrobe next morning.

  41

  Would it make a difference if I had been able to tell her about the future, how things turn out? I would love to have told her that I’ve come back here to Berlin and the church with the blue light is still the same, no difference. The same blue squares of glass all around and the blue sunlight entering through them, spreading evenly across everyone who comes in. You get the impression that your hands are turning blue and silent, remembering. You come out into the brightness of the street with your blue fingers sensitive to the noise of traffic. Time has moved on a good bit into the autumn now, I would love to tell her. The city has kept going, moving ahead of you and it’s changed colour again to brown and copper and red and everything in between. Leaves curled up and crunching under your feet. Leaves spread out along the path in the park, men and women making great piles of them with wide rakes. I would love her to have seen the way the city looks at this time. Leaves in the shop windows, hanging, falling around the display of writing materials, handpicked leaves in unbelievable colours like blood red and yellow as flame, some of them still holding on to green at the edges, in among pens and diaries and leather-bound photo albums.

  And lanterns.

  I would love her to have seen the lanterns. One evening when I was coming through the park and it was already dark, I want to tell her, I saw about ten or fifteen of them gathered in an open space. Other lanterns came out from the trees around the edge of the park to join in with them. They were mostly orange, but other colours as well. It made me think of a luminous underwater creature, shifting and changing shape constantly. That’s how I would describe it to her. And then I saw that they were all mothers and fathers with children. Some of the lanterns turned out to be faces lit up by lanterns. One of the lanterns broke away and started moving quickly up a small hill with another lantern after it. Until they both came back and joined in with the main group again. Then the entire collection of lanterns began moving very slowly towards me. There must have been about thirty or forty of them in all, I would say, getting closer and closer until I was surrounded by lanterns, all singing as they passed me by.

  That would have been good for her to see.

  I would love to have told her some more optimistic things. Would that have made a difference to the way she thought of me, the general impression that she took away with her at the end of her life?

  Your daughter will be all right, she said to me.

  It’s good to remember her saying that. She was guessing at the future in her absence, telling me not to worry so much, things would take care of themselves, you can’t plan out everything in advance. As regards what she thought of me, I don’t know. She was free to assume anything she liked, she had that gift. And I could no more influence her view of me than I can influence what other people think of me. It’s not in my hands to shape the story that people remember.

  All I could think of telling her in Berlin was that my brother continues to keep the house where we grew up intact, the same front door, the same windows, everything unchanged. The pictures, the books, the hallway table, even the mice running along the floor, they still have the same entry-point under the stairs. If I was living there, I told her, I might have ripped everything out including the old plumbing, that’s me, I have the tendency to renovate. My brother is happy to live with his childhood around him.

  Everything is there, I told her. The view overlooking the back gardens, the apple trees, the granite walls with the snails hiding in the ivy, the back gate that never closed properly. Even the sky is unchanged, still shaking with the bang of my father’s fist on the table. And the sash window that broke one night in a storm. My father came rushing into the bedroom full of anger and I thought he was coming to punish me, but he was only coming to close the window, which was rattling. It was the days of wood and putty, the sash frame was rotten, and when he tried to close it down, the bottom of the frame came apart in his hands like a piece of fruit cake. The glass was smashed. My father had to find a way to cover the gaps, so he switched on the light and looked around the room for the nearest thing at hand. In the corner of the room there was an old atlas, a big rolled-up school atlas which he kept from the time he was a schoolteacher in Dunmanway. He rolled it out and nailed it up against the window frame. It’s a temporary solution, he said. Go to sleep. So that’s how I fell asleep, looking at the world from my bed, with my back against the wall. All
the anger was outside. The branches of the trees throwing shadows onto the world and the wind flapping across the oceans.

  I never thought it was possible to live without anger in Ireland. Maybe my father was also like the King in Don Carlo. He was full of love and guilt and fear of losing his power. But he was not trying to kill me. He was just very sensitive to noise, that’s all. Even the phone would make him jump. I don’t know what made him like that, maybe he was still listening out for all the things that scared him, things from his own childhood perhaps, his own father missing. He was scared by the noise of children. It was like something he couldn’t fix, like water hammer. He didn’t know what to do with children making noise. And the only thing you could do with water hammer was to rip out the whole plumbing system and start again from scratch. He loved children in his own way. He was good at remembering birthdays. He was good at buying mouth organs and geography magazines and teaching the rules of chess. But he couldn’t take any of us running around the house, bouncing on beds or jumping down three steps at the bottom of the stairs, it would make him leap up from his chair and the book would fly out of his hand, we were worse than water hammer.

  She made me work things out for myself. It’s only in Berlin with her that I discovered how to remember, how time was always going backwards in our family. I was a child watching, like her, unable to explain it until I went back and began to remember the same things as my brother.

  Why was it so difficult for my father’s brother to come and visit my mother? And why was my mother so unhappy about him not coming? I didn’t understand why anyone would want a visit from somebody who remained so silent, somebody whose silence was so terrifying. Now I think of the Jesuit and his silence more as a quiet aggression in the house. Withholding words. Saying nothing seems worse than saying the worst. It’s only now that I understand how it was exactly this silence in my father’s brother that my mother admired so much. After my father died, she sat looking out the window at the gardens unchanged, waiting for him, the Jesuit. But he was in love with my aunt. The Jesuit was unable to visit because my aunt was afraid he still loved my mother. Because my father’s brother and my mother had so much to remember together. Every baptism, every communion, every time we were sick with asthma and he came up the stairs and silently made the sign of the cross over us so we could breathe again. Every time he came to pray for better school results, every time there was a problem in the house between me and my father and the Jesuit had to come and act as a mediator, only that he never said a word, just kept his silence.

  There was great excitement whenever my father’s brother came to see us. My mother made us put on our best clothes, she put the best table-cloth on the table, she made the best cake and she quickly took off her apron when she heard the bell ringing. My father’s brother brought sweets in his pocket, and books, and silence. Silence that made my father jealous. Books that made him suspicious. My father insisted on reading all the books first, to see what was in them, what his brother might be saying to my mother through these books. My father loved my mother through music and my father’s brother loved her through books. And then my father’s brother fell in love with my aunt. He continued living under one roof with the Jesuits, but he was more often staying under the same roof with my aunt. He no longer came to visit my mother, he couldn’t.

  I don’t know what my father thought about all this at the time. I have never tried to imagine what was going on inside his head. His mind was not a place we were allowed into either, because he never showed us how he felt, only with his anger. I’m not even sure I have the right to enter now and speculate over my father’s thoughts, because he left so little for us to go on. I can remember nothing that he ever said about his brother, not a single word. I think he was like us, afraid of his brother, the Jesuit. I think my father loved my mother so much he was afraid of her talking to anyone else, even us. Most of all, I think he was afraid of the Jesuit. He was afraid he could never match his brother’s silence.

  Apart from that I have no idea what he was thinking. I’m just standing in for him now, as a father.

  He took us out fishing one day around that time, I remember, myself and my brother, we caught lots of mackerel and my father left a smile behind him in the boat. Or was it a smile? Maybe it was only the sun in his eyes and the effort of rowing. My brother and I both remember this word for word, my father smiling with his eyes closed and the oars squeaking, the water dripping from the oars faster than honey dripping from the spoon, and my brother was trying to slow the boat down with his hand in the water. We remember that day in exactly the same order – my father’s hands tying up the wet rope to the rusted ring in the harbour wall, the fine spray of water springing from the rope when it was tightened, the salt on our hands, the mackerel in a plastic bag still jumping and shivering inside. We were standing on the pier very hungry, our stomachs empty after coming back in off the sea, and my father was saying that he would bring us straight up for chips.

  And maybe that’s why our memory is so aligned on this. Because it was the biggest surprise hearing my father say we were going for chips. As if he stopped being our father and he was going to be more like other fathers from then on. We looked at each other standing on the pier and wondered what changed him. We thought he had suddenly turned into the best father in the world. He was not the kind of man who ever bought chips, he was against all that take-away food. He wanted people to eat their food where it was cooked, where they bought it. Because our house was exactly the distance of a packet of chips away from the chipper. People coming home from the pub at night always arrived right outside our house as they finished their fish and chips, so they threw the empty wrapper into our front garden. My father said they treated our garden like a refuse bin. And sometimes he stood at the bedroom window, installed like a security camera, just to see it for himself. Every Monday morning he would go out and put all the discarded chip papers from the weekend into the bin, then he came inside to wash his hands. Once we heard him say that he was going to collect all the empty chip bags and bring them back to the chipper at the end of the year. Sometimes people threw the packet of chips into our garden even before they finished eating them and we lay in our beds thinking about the uneaten chips inside. Our garden was the cut-off point and nobody ate chips any further beyond that because they were normally gone cold by then. My father hated anything to do with chips. He hated anything to do with salt and vinegar. It’s hard to explain what made him change his mind and break all his own rules, give in, go against his own principles. Myself and my brother talk about that day and we both believe my father wanted to find out once and for all what the truth was. He wanted to find out if our house really was the exact distance of a packet of chips. So he bought chips for himself and one each for me and my brother. And it took as long to get home as it took to eat the chips.

  42

  We covered a lot of ground together in Berlin. In time, in words, in the things we said to each other, in the places we went to visit. She had not come to Berlin to see the place and go away again like a tourist. She wanted more than that. She had come looking for something in herself, I knew that. Something left unsaid. Some clue dropped in the streets. I mean, how much information is enough? When can you say you really know a city? Or a person? When can you say that you know yourself?

  She was not mad about Sanssouci. We were out there briefly and she couldn’t wait to move on, it was stifling, all that opulence. She said the palace was designed like a wedding cake and she had no time for that sort of thing. On the way back she wanted to stop at the Wannsee Villa, where the Wannsee Conference took place. She came out silent.

  We passed by the old airport where the Americans rescued the people of West Berlin. We saw the synagogue with the golden dome. We saw the Turkish vegetable shops and Manfred showed her the street where he was living. We saw a house that was not renovated yet, with peeling paint along the façade and balconies with junk left out on them. Bicycles. Slogans written up about
freedom and justice, words that didn’t completely make sense, like free all prisoners. An end to all money. Stuff that people think up late at night. She loved that, people thinking outside the normal way of life. People with a bit of artistic rage left in them, she said. We saw an old wooden door with so much graffiti on it that it must have felt like walking into an abstract painting, like living inside a work of art. And outside on the pavement there were lots of things thrown out, a TV and a used mattress, bits of broken furniture, a sofa waiting to be sat on, an old reading lamp, bits of living without the lives.

  The city is a contradiction, she said to me.

  And she was a contradiction too, she was the first to admit. It’s my life and I have the right to contradict myself. I’m a big, random life, full of messy contradictions, that’s what she said. And at some point all the contradictions in a person fit together into one life. The contradictions are not contradictions any more, they become the story. Like all the contradictions come together in one city.

  If there was a clue to describe who she really was, then maybe it was something in herself that was always missing. Some place inside that could not be reached. Something that remained unresolved, put on hold. She said she had the weather inside her, changing all the time. Her life was a mixed-up condition, so she said, swinging between sadness and happiness, between loving everything and regretting everything.