Onkel Gerd said it was only a matter of time before somebody took it into his head to play God. The BDM meeting had been arranged to coincide with Mass, so that the girls in Kempen would turn away from the church, so they would belong to the state instead, like a big family. My mother insisted on getting up for early Mass. She could hear the loudspeakers on the square as if they wanted to drown out the prayers inside. And when she arrived late on the square with her missal under her arm, the BDM leader was already foaming at the mouth. She told the Kempen girls they would never need Mass or missals, or candles or head scarves or Corpus Christi processions any more, because now they would be devoted to the Führer. One day, the men in brown broke into the convent school in Mühlhausen smashing everything up and painting swastikas on the walls of the classrooms. And not long after that, they closed the convent down altogether so the nuns had to disappear, too.
The leaves of the missal are not like any other book, they are soft and thin, easy to bend and easy to turn without the slightest bit of noise in church. But outside at the big BDM assembly on the square, my mother says they made a big noise that nobody could ignore. All the girls had to raise their right arms in salute. So when my mother raised her arm, the missal fell down on the cobbles with a clack. It opened up and the breeze rustled the pages so they could be heard all around the square, maybe even all around the town. She bent down and picked it up. She dusted off the covers and then finally raised her arm in the air towards the portrait of the Führer over the Rathaus. The entire square was suddenly tilted at an angle, like a tilted painting, like the dizzy way you can see things when you bend down to look back through your legs. It was time to be obedient, time to swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer, time for the silent negative.
‘I sweat under oath that I will – NOT – serve the Führer as long as I live.’
After that it was like any other Sunday. Apart from the flags and the loudspeakers left behind on the Buttermarkt square, everything was normal. The shops stayed closed, but you could buy cake and you could see people coming out of the Café Kranz with precious parcels wrapped in coloured paper, holding them flat as they walked. Like every other Sunday, they went to the graveyard to put flowers on the graves. And then it was time to prepare for visitors in the afternoon.
You have to open the doors to be sure that the smell of soup is not lingering in the hallway when the visitors arrive. A sensitive nose can detect a hint of fat in the air, my mother says. Then you let the smell of baking take over. You would commit a mortal sin any time for a decent cup of coffee, my mother says, and then she laughs out loud, because that’s what her aunt Ta Maria always said. The smell of coffee and cake is like a hearty welcome, like an embrace. Your visitor will want to jump right into bed and snuggle up with the cake. And when you’re serving, you have to cut the slices without touching the cake. You have to serve with the same affection that has gone into the baking, using the silver trowel that has been in the family for generations. The cake has to appear on the plate as though it had never been touched by human hands.
On Sunday we went for a walk in the afternoon. We had to put on our coats and hats and gloves because it was windy and cold outside. My father criss-crossed his scarf over his chest and we did the same. Maria’s gloves were attached to an elastic band inside the sleeves of her coat so they wouldn’t get lost. We walked past the station where my father gets the train every day. We came to a place where we could kick through the brown leaves with a hissing noise. Sometimes my trousers rubbed against the inside of my leg and it was sore. And sometimes when we walked around the corner, the wind was so strong that we couldn’t even breathe or speak any more. We had to push hard against it until we started laughing.
Then we came to the shop and everyone got pocket money. Franz wanted a toffee pop and I wanted a bag of sherbet with a lollipop inside. We waited outside while my father and mother were still inside trying to help Maria decide what to buy. There were boys standing by the wall of the shop and they started calling us Nazis. There were lots of things like that written on the wall in paint, including a big swastika sign in red. They kept saying we were Nazis, until my mother came out and heard them.
‘Heil Hitler,’ they shouted.
They were not allowed to say that kind of thing and I looked at my mother to see what she would do. They said it again and laughed out loud, so there was no way that she might not have heard it. She even stopped and looked at them for a moment. But she said nothing. I knew she was biting her lip. I knew by her eyes that she was sad this was happening, but she could do nothing about it.
‘Come on, let’s walk ahead,’ she said. She didn’t wait for my father and Maria to come out, she just turned us around and walked away. Behind us we could hear them laughing and clicking their heels. I was sure my father would do something, but he said nothing either and we all walked quickly down to the seafront.
We could smell the sea and hear it because it was very rough. The waves were crashing in against the rocks, all white and brown. The seagulls were balancing in the air over the waves and we were standing in a line, holding on to the railings with brown rust marks growing through the blue paint. The dog was there, too, the dog that belongs to nobody and barks at the sea until he is hoarse and can’t speak. From behind the railings you could look the waves right in the eye as they came rushing in and my mother said: ‘God help anyone who is out at sea.’ The waves were so strong that when they threw themselves on to the rocks, the foam sprang up like a white tree. Bits of black seaweed were flung in the air with no mercy. We had to move back so as not to get wet. Only a tiny shower covered our faces and we could taste the salt. We shouted back at the waves but it was hard to talk because of the wind. Here’s a big one, my father said, but there was so much noise that you could hear nothing anyway, as if the sea was so loud, it was actually silent. My mother said nothing and just looked far away out into the waves. Bigger and bigger waves all the time, hitting the rocks and bouncing up, right in front of us.
Eleven
I like giving the wrong answer. My father sits on the far side of the table in the breakfast room and says he’s going to wait until I give the right answer, even if it takes all day.
‘Five plus six makes …?’
My father was a schoolteacher once so he knows what he’s doing. He says that he and his brother Ted both got a scholarship and now he wants to make me the best boy in Ireland at tables. I can see myself twice over in his glasses, sitting with my arms folded. He waits and waits, while I search around in my head and say to myself that I will – NOT – give the right answer. I know the answer but I frown and roll my eyes up towards the ceiling and even put my hand on my chin, because that’s meant to help you with thinking.
‘Nine,’ I answer.
‘Wrong,’ he says. ‘Think again.’
We have all the time in the world. It’s Saturday afternoon, he says, and we have better things to be doing. He could be sitting in the front room reading any one of six books about the history of Germany or the Spanish Civil War or the lives of saints or the Blasket Islands or cabinet-making or beekeeping. I could be outside running around in the garden. Franz is waiting for me to go and play football. But we’re going to stay sitting there in the breakfast room all day and all night if we have to. So then I try again, squinting and frowning and humming to myself, now let me see, five and six makes …? I have given every wrong answer there is so there’s none left except the right one.
I look at my father’s bad ear which is flattened out of shape and purple. When I asked him once what happened, he told me that a teacher in boarding school hit him with a steel ruler. Maria said she would pray for it to get better, but then he frowned and blinked and said he didn’t want us looking at his ear any more or talking about it. My mother told us afterwards that he had no father and at boarding school his ear started bleeding and lost all its feeling because he was homesick and wanted his mother. It’s hard not to look at his ear and think about the
steel ruler coming down like a sword. I keep thinking of things like that not happening. I try to imagine stopping it with my arm. I imagine fighting off the teacher with long brush. I imagine bending my father’s ear back into shape again, like plasticine.
‘Concentrate.’
He slams his hand down suddenly on the table and I jump. Then my mother comes in because she doesn’t want this to go on for ever either. She says it’s time to give in and then I’ll be free to go. Outside, I can hear the sound of Mr Richardson hammering at something and the echo coming back across the gardens. I can hear Miss Tarleton’s lawnmower and I know there’s hardly any grass on her lawn but she does it anyway. Then I hear the two bangs from the lifeboat, one after the other with a long gap in between, and my mother saying ‘trouble on the sea’. I can hear the Corbetts’ back door closing like a sneeze. Then silence again. Everyone is waiting for the right answer. My mother is nodding. My father is staring. And Franz is standing at the door with the football.
‘Nil.’
It’s the only answer I could think of that I hadn’t given already apart from the right one. But then there was real trouble and real silence. People passing by our house would have heard nothing at all only breathing. Now I could see my father’s eyes inside his glasses, and his ear was red hot, like a piece of coal out of the boiler. He pushed the chair back with a loud howl on the floor and told me to wait while he searched in the greenhouse for a good stick that wouldn’t break this time.
My mother shook her head because it was out of her hands. The person who can’t hear it, must feel it, she said a few times, because that’s what they say in Germany. I could see that she was sorry this was happening but she could do nothing to stop it. She took Franz and Maria away and closed the door. I could hear the ‘in between door’ closing, too, that separates the back of the house from the front. I could hear her going up the stairs, further and further away, closing another door behind her until she could hear nothing at all any more and didn’t have to think about what was going to happen. Everybody was gone, even the sound of the hammering outside, and I could only hear the stick whipping through the air. My father was breathing hard and thinking about lots of angry things in his head like the lives of saints and beekeeping and the time he was at school in Dunmanway and couldn’t go home to his mother. He was thinking about all the things that he couldn’t do with his own life, that he was going to make me do instead. He said he would keep hitting me all day and all night until I gave the right answer.
‘Eleven,’ I cried. ‘Eleven, eleven, eleven.’
Then he stopped and asked me if I was good again.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Say it.’
‘I’m good again.’
I could still feel the hot red lines on the back of my legs when it was time for tea. Franz and Maria wanted to look at them but I didn’t want anyone talking about me, not even my mother. My father shook my hand and said it was time to put it all behind us. It was time to smile because we all have to be friends again. But I couldn’t smile. So then he held my chin and pushed my lips apart with his fingers and I had to show my teeth.
‘Nobody can force you to smile,’ my mother said.
She had a better idea. She offered me an extra biscuit, one more than anyone else. And then she started telling a story about the time they got married and went up two mountains, one in each country. On the train going along the Rhine together, they sat in a carriage with a young boy who looked out the window and ate biscuits from a brown paper bag. All the way to Koblenz, the boy sat eating one biscuit after the other without a word, as if he would never see a biscuit in his life again, as if he was afraid the time of no biscuits would come back. Sometimes he closed the bag and put it aside, as though he told himself he was not going to have any more, but then he could not resist starting again and again until the whole lot was gone.
After that I was sick for a long time. It started after we helped to clean the windows one day, first with soap, then with crumpled newspapers that make a squeaking sound like wild dogs barking far away in the hills, my mother says. The windows were so clean that we thought we were outside and there was no glass at all. After that it was hard to breathe, because the sound of the wild dogs got into my chest. I had to stay in bed listening to them howling all day and all night. My mother came with plasticine and cars. She bought a new colouring book and new pencils, but my fingers were soft and I couldn’t draw. She came in with a tray, but I could not even eat the biscuits, so she made me sit up and drink the lemon tea, at least one sip for your mother, she said.
At night she left the door wide open and the light coming up the stairs, but I was still afraid. The window rattled and there was a large piece of wallpaper hanging down on the far side of the room which looked like a man with a hat coming in sideways through the wall from next door. At first I laughed and said he was only a piece of wallpaper. But he just looked at me with one eye and kept coming with his shoulder held forward. A light from the street shone into the room and sometimes the man stepped right into the light, then moved back into the darkness again. I was very hot and shivering at the same time. I put my back against the wall and started shouting at him to stop, until my mother came running up and sat on my bed. She said I was soaked with sweat and brought in a warm towel to wipe my chest. She said I was afraid of my own imagination. My father came up and stuck a piece of folded paper in the window to stop the rattling. He put on the light for a minute to prove that there was no man coming through the wall, then he smiled and kissed the top of my head. He listened to the howling in my chest and said it didn’t sound as bad as before. Then he went downstairs again and my mother stayed sitting on my bed to tell stories.
‘I don’t want to be a Nazi,’ I told her.
‘But you’re not a Nazi,’ she said.
She smiled and tucked the blankets in around my neck so that only my head was out. I told her what the boys outside the shop were saying about us.
‘I don’t want them to call me a Nazi,’ I said.
‘Ignore them,’ she said. She looked at me for a while and said they were the real Nazis. She said I shouldn’t worry about it so much, because it was usually people who had something to hide who called other people Nazis. ‘They want to make everybody believe that they’re innocent. So they call other people Nazis, as often as they can. It’s the same the world over.’
She stroked my forehead. She said it was not important what the boys outside the shop said. If I was a real Nazi, then I would know it myself. Maybe you can hide it from other people by pointing the finger somewhere else, but you can’t hide things like that from yourself. What’s inside your head is what matters.
‘But that won’t stop them.’
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t go around telling the whole world what you’re not. That would be ridiculous. I can’t send you down the road to the shop with a sign around your neck saying “I’m not a Nazi.”’
It was time to concentrate on good things. Soon I would be better again, running around like before with no dogs howling in my chest. And my father has a new plan, she said, a plan to make money, so that we can take the wallpaper down. Sometimes he is very hard, she said, but he knows what’s good for Ireland. He doesn’t mean to be angry, but he has a lot to worry about and he’s doing his best. And the next day he was busy downstairs starting a new business that would make us rich, so we could take down the old wallpaper. He bought a desk for the front room. He put the telephone on it and a desk-light so he could sit down and have his own office. He bought lots of stationery, too, and gave the business a name. Kaiser and Co., he called it, because that was my mother’s name and her family had been in business for a long time in Kempen before they went bankrupt. He got a machine that printed the name on to paper, so he wouldn’t have to write it out every time. And when the business was set up, he sat at his desk waiting for phone calls and saying there should be less noise in the house, because he had to try and guess wha
t the people of Ireland needed most at that moment.
My mother said I was getting better. She let me go downstairs to the front room to see the new office. My father was out buying stamps and I lay on the sofa with all the cushions and blankets while my mother sat at the desk with her diary, writing in all the things that were happening in our family. She glued everything in, like photographs and locks of hair and tickets to the zoo. She wrote in lots of stories, like me not giving the right answer and Franz going to bed every night, laying out his socks in the shape of a crucifix. She also put in things that were happening outside in the world, like the photograph from the newspaper of the tanks in Hungary, and a photograph of the Irishman, Ronnie Delaney on his knees thanking God for winning the race at the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Then she went into the kitchen and it was our turn to play office. Maria started drawing a picture on the wall and Franz found a matchstick.
‘Light it,’ I said. But I didn’t even have to say that, because the match was saying it himself with his little red head, asking to be lit. Franz struck it along the wall and it flared up. He blew it out straightaway, but my father must have heard it. His good ear can hear things from miles away. He asked if we had lit a match. He called my mother in because she has a good nose and between them they were able to prove it. She said that’s why people get married, because one person has a good ear and the other has a good nose, and hopefully we would have both and that would help us not to do anything in our lives that we would regret later.
The Speckled People Page 8