Franz said nothing. He just stood there and waited in silence. He was doing what my mother always said we should do, to pretend they didn’t exist. I did the same. I tried to pretend that standing in that spot in the football field was exactly what I wanted to do at that moment. I remembered what my mother said about fighting. Maria stopped resisting, too, and they gave up putting snow under her jumper because it was no fun any more. They were not afraid of anything. They pushed us back against the wire fence of the football field with sticks. The leader of the gang was not even afraid of the cold, because he picked up snow and caked it into a flat, icy disc while the other boys all blew into their cupped red hands for warmth.
‘Nazi bastards,’ he said.
They made a circle around us and whispered among themselves. One of the boys was pushing a dirty piece of brown snow towards Franz with his shoe, saying that he was going to make him eat it. But Franz ignored him. I knew Franz was saying the silent negative in his head. Then Maria started crying and I wanted to cry as well only Franz stopped me.
‘Don’t indulge them,’ he said.
They repeated it a few times in a German accent. And for some of them it was a sign to start speaking in a kind of gibberish that made no sense. ‘Gotten, Blitzen, fuckin’ Himmel.’ One of the boys started dancing around, trampling a circle in the snow with ‘Sieg Heils’ and I suddenly wanted to start laughing. I thought they were very funny and I wanted to be Irish like them, to laugh and make up some of these stupid words, too, all the stuff they had collected from the comics and from films where the Germans were always losers. One of them tried to speak German by himself with his face all contorted with pain.
‘Rippen schtoppen … Krauts. Donner und Blitzen, Himmel, Gunther-Schwein … Messerschmidt …’ he said in one long burst. Then he suddenly died in the snow, falling back and shaking as if he was riddled with bullets. ‘Aaargh …’
I couldn’t help laughing. I could see myself as part of the gang, joining in and walking around the streets with them, laughing at everything. It made me feel soft in my tummy to think that I could be friends with them. But the leader didn’t like it. He wanted me to be the enemy and to see how tough us Germans really were. So he flung the snowball and it hit me in the eye with a flash of white, like a hard lump of icy stone. I couldn’t see anything and I rubbed my eye, but I didn’t let myself cry because I didn’t want to let my brother down. I showed them that nothing could hurt me and that Germans didn’t feel pain.
They continued to talk among themselves, trying to decide what to do with us. I heard one of them say that we should be put on trial.
‘Yeah, put them on trial,’ they all agreed.
‘Guilty or not guilty?’
I knew that whatever they said about us we could never deny it. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter any more. They said things about the sinking of the Bismarck or the gas ovens but we didn’t know anything like that yet. I wanted to tell them what my mother said about the silent negative, but I knew they would only laugh at that. It was no use. We were at the mercy of their court in the snow. There was nobody else in the world to say who was right or wrong. Everybody was inside on Christmas day and we were alone on the white football field with a breeze pushing the tops of the trees behind us. Above the tall goal posts, the sky was grey and green again and it looked like there would be more snow. Low on the sky there were flashes of white or silver seagulls and I knew we just had to wait.
‘We have to go home now,’ Maria suddenly said, as if she could just bring this whole thing to an end by acting like an adult. She tried to move forward, but they only pushed her back again.
‘Execute them,’ one of them shouted.
They didn’t even have time for a trial. Maybe they were numb with the cold like us and wanted to go home to eat sweets and play with toys, so they decided to get on with the sentence and started to make snowballs. One of them said to pack them hard and another one of them included the discoloured piece of snow in his armoury, and when they all had heaps of white cannon balls ready beside their feet, we waited for the order and watched the leader of the gang raise his hand. It seemed like an endless wait. I thought of all kinds of things that had nothing to do with being a Nazi. I remembered that the words in Irish for grey and green are the same. I thought of marzipan potatoes. And the peculiar skull-shaped design of plum pudding. I thought of the bell on the wall of my father and mother’s bedroom that didn’t work any more, and I thought of the three little dials on the gas meter under the stairs, until the hand eventually came down and a shout brought with it a hail of blinding white fire.
‘It’s only snow,’ Franz said.
He had his hands up over his eyes. Even after they were gone and the football field was empty and silent and it was already starting to get dark, he still had his hands up.
We might as well have been in Kempen, sitting in the front room eating Christmas cake, while my father lit the candles on the Christmas tree one more time. We sat on the carpet and played a game of cards where one person was always left with a picture of the black crow and had to be marked on the nose with a piece of charcoal, until everybody was a loser once and had a black nose. My father stood up and opened the door of the big bookcase to take out the bottle of Asbach Uralt. He took out the cork with a tiny, high-pitched squeak that sounded like a hiccup and poured two glasses so that the room filled up with a smell of cognac, along with the smell of pine needles and matches and candle wax.
‘A cognac-een,’ my mother called it. She liked to make things sound smaller than they were, like they did in Irish, too, because everything was better when it was small and harmless and less greedy. She sipped slowly and closed her eyes so she could think about what she was drinking. She said it was like a little kiss from God above. She laughed and said it again, like a tiny, little kiss from God.
My father then put on a record. He took it out of the sleeve and made sure not to touch the music with his fingers as he placed it on the turntable. He frowned as he did it, but I knew that nobody could be angry, because it was Christmas. When he dropped the needle down lightly with his index finger, you could hear a crackle before the woman began to sing in German, a high voice that was so beautiful, my mother said, it was like silver coins falling down the stairs. And at the end, there was a single note that rose up so high in the air that it stayed in the room long after the song was over.
Sometimes a candle crackled and spluttered. And outside it was dark. I knew the football field was empty now and there was nobody out in the world. More snow was covering the footprints and it was easy to forget what happened. We had been executed but we were warm and there was a nice smell of the Christmas tree in the room, so it was easy to forget how cold and numb your hands could be outside. We had orange juice to drink and chocolate angels to eat. My father was putting on another record and my mother sniffed the cognac-een. Everybody was safe now and we were lucky to be German, but I knew it wasn’t over yet.
Seventeen
I keep thinking of things not happening.
If you lie in bed and think hard enough, you can pretend that lots of things don’t happen. I can pretend that I’m floating above the bed and that my feet are miles away across the sea. I can pretend that I can’t use my left arm, that I only have one arm, like Mr Smyth in the vegetable shop. I can pretend that my father has no limp. And I keep thinking there was no such thing as Hitler, or the Nazis, because then my mother would not fall on the ice and break her teeth. The day we go down to Mass early in the morning, when it’s still dark and there’s ice on all the roads and we have to hold her hand, I keep thinking that didn’t happen.
My mother says I’m a dreamer and it’s true what they say about me in school. I’m the boy who lives a million miles away in outer space. She smiles at me with all her new teeth and says goodnight. But she’s the one who is dreaming and still hoping that some things didn’t happen at all, because she stays in the room after she’s switched off the light, just to sta
nd at the window for a while before she goes downstairs again. The light from the street outside makes the branches of the trees blow across her face. It’s very quiet and she doesn’t say a word for a long time.
‘Nobody can force you to smile,’ she says.
‘What?’ I ask. But I know she’s not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she’s the last person left in the room.
‘They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.’
It’s hard to find out what she means sometimes, but I know that she’s talking about the bad film in Germany when the houses and trains were on fire. She’s standing there with the black and white branches moving across her face and across the wall behind her, as if she’s stuck on the screen, standing under the light waiting for somebody.
I know that she had lots of men who wanted to go out with her in Germany, but they were all ‘brown’, which meant that they were Nazis and she had to wait for something better. Ta Maria kept saying that it wasn’t a good time for men. I’m glad I’m not looking for a husband myself, she often said. I’d rather a soldier with a missing leg any day than one of those young house-devils in brown uniform. So my mother said no to them all. And then she always laughs and sings the song about the man kissing the dog.
Ich küsse Ihre Hand Madam, und denk es wär Ihr Mund.
Ich küsse Ihren Mund Madam, und denk es wär Ihr Hund.
I kiss your hand, Madame, and wish it was your mouth.
I kiss your mouth, Madame, and wish it was your hound.
So she waited and carried on working at the registry office in Kempen, until one day when she went on holiday with Marianne to the Eifel mountains and they both met Angelo. He was a good man. He was serious and had great humour. It was hard to know which of them he was more interested in at first, because he paid them both the same amount of attention. He had read the same poems by Rilke that they had also read. He was polite and eager not to leave either one of them out of the conversation. If he spent a morning walking through the fields with Marianne, then he would make up for it in the afternoon coming back with her younger sister. At night in their campbeds, they whispered about him as if he was the last good man left in Germany.
I know they were the best two weeks that my mother ever spent in her life, because she still likes to talk about them. And sometime later, she received a parcel from him with a scarf inside and a book. She was so excited about the gift that she went around and told everyone, even all the old people working in the registry office, until Marianne wrote to say that she too had got a scarf, and the same book. So then it was time to give way, my mother says, because that was Angelo and he married Marianne later on and never came home from the war.
And then she’s gone. The branches are still waving across the screen, but she’s downstairs again, clacking on the typewriter, putting down all the things that she can’t say to anyone, not even my father. Things you can’t say in a song, or a story, only on the typewriter for people to read later on sometime, on their own, without looking into your eyes.
She got a new job in Düsseldorf, working in the central employment office. She was glad to be in a city at last where things were happening and you could go to the theatre and meet new people. The office was run by an energetic man named Stiegler who arrived every morning smelling of aftershave, dressed in a lovely suit with the newspaper already read and folded under his arm. He wore good shoes and always had his hair combed. He greeted everyone by name and shook everyone’s hand, clasping it in both of his with great warmth. She was the youngest and the older women in the office said he was a good boss who liked a joke from time to time, unlike the crusty old boss that went before him. Herr Stiegler was human, they said, and not bad looking at all. He was modern, too, because even though he was married himself, that didn’t stop him flirting harmlessly now and again, just for the fun of it. And whenever it was somebody’s birthday, he made sure that it was remembered.
I know that she didn’t like the work very much, but Herr Stiegler praised her and said she was intelligent. He was good with compliments. And if she made a mistake in her typing, he would not shout or humiliate her in front of the other women, but instead just point to the misspelling so that she could quietly go and do it again. It was a matter of being obedient and efficient, however boring and senseless the work was. Even when she once made a big mistake and he should have been really angry, he just smiled and said quite honestly that it was pigs’ work. He expected more from her. And the way he said it was so inspiring that you could only vow to do better in future.
There was little contact with the other workers outside the office hours. They all went home to their families. So one evening, Herr Stiegler invited her out to the theatre to meet his wife. And Frau Stiegler was so kind and kept the conversation going afterwards over a glass of wine at a nearby cafe. They were cultured people, she discovered, and some days later, when Herr Stiegler noticed a book of Rilke poems in her bag at the office, he was able to discuss them with her and even went on to suggest that she should read a poet named Stefan George, a real German master. He said the greatest poets were also the greatest patriots.
In Düsseldorf she didn’t feel so much like an orphan any more. She was a grown-up now. At nineteen years of age, her other sisters envied her because she was able to do lots of new things, like going to concerts and watching the latest films that would take years to arrive in a small town like Kempen. She bought new clothes and changed her hair. The Olympia Roll didn’t quite suit her any more and she decided to wear it more casually, in natural curls that other women in the office said they would give their right eye for. Everyone admired her, even Herr Stiegler, though he didn’t comment openly. He waited until he found a big mistake in her typing and then he came right over to her desk and informed her that he was a little disappointed with her work.
‘But the hairstyle,’ he whispered, ‘that’s a big success.’
My mother says if we could all see into the future and tell what’s coming then it would be a wonderful world altogether. Lots of things wouldn’t happen at all. If you could tell the future then you could stop trains crashing into each other. She says the Germans are very good at finding out what’s going to happen and being ready for it because of all the things that have gone wrong before. But lots of things in this world still happen for the first time and sometimes people just don’t expect it.
Everybody must have known that there was another war coming. Herr Stiegler was away a good bit after that, setting up new recruitment programmes in various towns and cities in the region. It was all in the newspaper, too. The women in the office cut out a picture of Herr Stiegler, smiling and saluting along with leading figures in the Nazi party.
And then one day, he picked her out to set up an office in the town of Venlo, on the Dutch border. The whole thing had to be restructured and he would need a dynamic assistant. Out of all the women in the department, he chose her for this important job. She was very happy and a little embarrassed to think that the others in the office were giving her jealous glances. She got ready and took the train to Venlo and started working immediately with energy. There would be no more typing errors, she vowed. She got a small room at the top of the administration building where she would stay and it was nice to have the whole house to herself at night.
On the second night, Herr Stiegler came back to the office because he had forgotten something important. She heard him downstairs. He was very polite and came up to her room, just to make sure that she didn’t get a fright, hearing somebody in the office below. It was only him, he assured her. When he tried the handle of the door and found that she kept it locked at night, he laughed and said she had nothing to fear. But even then she didn’t open the door, because it wasn’t right to let a man into her room at night.
Herr Stiegler went downstairs to look for what he needed. And afterwards he came back up once more to speak to her again through the door. He said he had f
orgotten to mention it before but that he had brought something for her, just something small, a book of poetry. It was Stefan George. She said thank you very much, it was very kind of him, but that she had already gone to bed and she hoped she wasn’t being rude by waiting for it until the morning in the office. So then Herr Stiegler said he just quickly wanted to point out a line or two in the book.
‘My wife is downstairs,’ he said. ‘I better not keep her waiting.’
‘She’s here, in Venlo?’
‘Of course,’ Herr Stiegler said.
So then she had to get dressed quickly and open the door. And before she knew it he was in the room, reading out one of the poems and telling her what it meant. She was nervous and didn’t like the way he talked about the poetry. He was breathless. She was afraid that Frau Stiegler would suddenly come upstairs and there would be trouble.
‘I must ask you to leave now,’ she insisted, but he just smiled at her and asked what she was so afraid of.
‘Come on,’ he said. He put the book down and stepped towards her. She could smell the cognac on his breath as he put his hands straight on her waist. She tried to push him away. She tried to remind him that his wife was downstairs waiting.
‘Frau Stiegler …,’ she kept saying, but that didn’t stop him.
‘Come on, Fraülein Kaiser, don’t make such a big fuss,’ he said. And then she was afraid because she knew what was coming but she couldn’t stop it.
I can see the branches dancing across the street light outside. I can see them swinging from side to side along the wall in my room. I can hear my mother clacking downstairs on the typewriter, putting everything down on paper for later. She can’t stop what’s happening, but she can write it down instead, how she struggled to keep Herr Stiegler away from her. All she could think of doing was to call through the open door, down along the empty corridor.
‘Frau Stiegler,’ she shouted. ‘Upstairs.’
The Speckled People Page 13