‘It’s all right, Tutti,’ I can hear them saying all the time. ‘It’s all right, mein Schätzchen, it’s all right.’
The man named Gearóid still comes to our house sometimes on Saturdays and he says the only thing that would help Bríd is goat’s milk. He comes in his Volkswagen and says we’re a true Irish fireside and we should be drinking goat’s milk anyway. He wants my father to start making speeches again and to write for the newspaper Aiséirí, like he did long ago. Everybody knows that the Aiséirí office is on Harcourt Street because you can see the blue Volkswagen outside every day with all the newspapers on the back seat, and sometimes you can see a goat tied to the railings as well to show the people of Dublin that the Irish are not afraid to be different. Gearóid keeps a goat in the city and we keep bees in the city, to remind people not to be so afraid of the country. My mother thought the goat was coming out to our house in the back of the Volkswagen but Gearóid said it would only eat up all the copies of Aiséirí, so the next time he came out he brought a canteen full of goat’s milk instead and my father gave him a jar of honey in exchange.
The goat’s milk didn’t help Bríd. She spat it out all over the bed clothes because it looked grey and tasted like pee-pee. Some people said Bríd should not be drinking milk at all. Some said she should be living in the mountains in Switzerland, not by the sea in Ireland, because it’s damp and sometimes you can’t even look out the window. Miss Tarleton said Bríd would grow out of it because she had a really bad chest herself when she was a little girl, and look at her now, she’s 78 years old and she can’t remember the last time she had a cold or even a cough. But Bríd doesn’t want to be like Miss Tarleton when she grows up with two different shoes on. The Miss Ryans said Bríd should go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Fatima but you have to be in a wheelchair for that. A German woman, who was not allowed to come to our house because she was divorced, gave my mother eucalyptus oil. And Mr Furlong told my mother it was good to have asthma, because then you would never get malaria. But Bríd is still sick all the time and getting thin because she doesn’t want to eat anything any more, not even glucose sticks or cakes that my mother makes.
In the middle of the night the doctor had to come back again because she was trying to open the window and get air from outside. I woke up and heard her crying, begging my father for air, and my mother still saying ‘it’s all right, mein Schatzchen, it’s all right. Come back to bed now.’ Everybody was afraid because nobody in our house ever cried that much before. I got up and saw Bríd reaching forward with her mouth open. My mother and father were holding her arms on each side. I asked if I could help but my father told me to get back to bed. Franz and Maria were standing on the landing as well, and they ran back into bed as soon as they heard his voice. My mother came and told us to pray hard, so I listened to Bríd in the dark and prayed that the bad chest would come back to me instead. Then I heard Dr Sheehan’s voice downstairs in the hall. He said Bríd was an angel and a saint and he gave her an injection to make her go to sleep. The next morning she was still going up and down all the time, but she was smiling again and my mother got her to eat some toast with jam.
Gearóid came again the next Saturday with the new Aiséirí. He’s always dressed in a brown tweed suit. His knees are bent even when he’s standing up, and, one time, me and Franz laughed because his trousers looked like they wanted to stay sitting down. He has bits of hair growing on his cheeks, too, where he stopped shaving, and a big smile when we answer him in Irish. He says Bríd is a páistín fionn, a blonde child, and really Irish underneath. She’s a fighter, he says. Then they go into the front room to talk for a long time about all the things that are not finished yet in Ireland, like still only one pop song in Irish about a goat that went mad and had to be stopped by the priest, and lots of other things like street names still in English and no parking fines in Irish. What if somebody wanted to break the law in Irish? Gearóid said they were going to put him in jail for not paying motor tax on the Volkswagen in English. They were going to put my father in jail, too, because he was waiting to pay a fine in Irish. My mother brings in the tea and we can hear Gearóid’s voice coming out under the door. He says he can’t keep writing all the articles in Aiséirí on his own, and he wants my father to write something big instead of just writing letters to the papers.
One day my father wrote a strong letter to the papers to prove that what they were saying about Cardinal Stepinac was wrong, that he wasn’t a Nazi at all and that he didn’t even hate any Jewish people, even though he was a Catholic. It was a big mistake to believe Radio Éireann, he wrote, because they only repeated the rubbish that the Communists in Yugoslavia were saying. They locked Cardinal Stepinac up in his house and put him on trial because they felt guilty themselves. People who feel guilty point the finger, my father says, and they’re just putting the blame on Cardinal Stepinac for everything that happened in the concentration camps. There were lots more letters in the paper after that and a Protestant man named Hubert Butler from Kilkenny once insulted the Papal Nuncio, saying that Cardinal Stepinac was guilty because the Catholic priests in Yugoslavia baptised children before they were killed in concentration camps. Nobody in Ireland could ever believe that priests helped the Nazis to kill children and save their souls. Nobody could ever believe Catholic priests helped a big SS man named Artukovic to escape to Ireland after the war and live in Dublin for two years before he emigrated to Paraguay. My father says Cardinal Stepinac should be made into a saint, and Gearóid said it was a pity my father didn’t take up writing again because he was so good at making speeches and lighting matches and going around the country on his motorbike.
‘His speeches had passion,’ Gearóid said to my mother. ‘He had them throwing their hats up.’
It’s good to hear people saying that. It’s good to think about my father standing up on a platform with crowds of people around him in the street throwing their hats up and not caring if they ever came back down again. It’s good to like your own father otherwise you won’t like yourself very much either. You want to believe that everything your own father says is always right.
‘Aiséirí,’ Gearóid said. ‘Resurrection. What about the daily uprising?’
My father smiled and said he was still waking up for Ireland every morning, but he was very busy with other things, too, at the moment, like beekeeping and making German oak furniture and reading about how to cure asthma without listening to doctors. He was starting to translate a German book as well that Onkel Ted gave my mother about training children without sticks. He was also trying to write more letters about Cardinal Stepinac not helping the Nazis to kill children, as well as trying to write an article about Guernica to say that the painting of screaming cows and legs in the air by Picasso might be a masterpiece, but maybe it wasn’t the Germans who did it. Gearóid says the Irish spent a long time building stone walls and saying the opposite and pretending the British were not there, and my father is a real Irishman with a gift for being against. He holds his fist up in the air and says my father could make anyone believe that day is night. He turns to my mother and winks at her because she is the audience and she says it’s good that people in Ireland can’t be kept quiet.
‘Remember the article they tried to ban,’ Gearóid said.
‘What article?’ my mother asked.
Gearóid punched his fist down on the side of the armchair and told her that my father once wrote a great article about the Jewish people in Ireland. He said they tried to stop them from printing it. They threatened to close down the office in Harcourt Street. The police came and took away lots of documents, but they were not afraid of going to prison and they went to confession and printed the article on the front page, because Aiséirí is the Irish for not sitting down.
‘Did you never read it?’ he said. ‘It was very well written. Very balanced and fair-minded. Maybe it didn’t even go far enough.’
After that my mother was very upset and she didn’t even do the washing-up. S
he was using the silent negative all the time. She told Bríd she was going back to Germany. She said she was going to pack her bags and take Bríd with her to a place where she would be able to breathe.
There were lots of doors slamming in our house after that. Bríd jumps in bed when the door of the front room bangs shut. Sometimes we get a fright as well when there’s a draught and the back door bangs shut in anger of its own accord. I know where my father is by the sound of the last door banging. One day I started slamming doors as well, but he said that wasn’t allowed and it’s not too late for him to get the stick and take me upstairs and close all the doors so that nobody will hear. My mother reminds him that he’s translating a book about punishing children without sticks, so then he puts on his coat and slams the front door, and everybody thinks he’s gone away and never coming back. Everything in the house rattles and then stays quiet for a long time. Then one day I told everybody I was leaving and slammed the front door from inside. It was a joke just to annoy them. I hid behind the oak trunk in the hall so that everybody thought I was gone for ever, but then Bríd started crying and my mother said she would start banging the doors, too, one day, then we would see how funny it was. And one night she did it. It was very late but she did it really and truly. My father came back and slammed the door of the front room without eating his dinner. He sat there staring at all the patterns in the carpet. My mother didn’t want him to feel sorry for himself, so she went in to sit beside him and put her arm around him like a friend for life. She wanted him to say that he made a mistake, but he just pushed her away. Then she stood in the hall and put her coat on slowly. She went out and closed the front door very, very quietly, as if she was leaving us and going back to Germany for ever.
‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I said. Nobody ever heard a door closing so much before in their whole lives. It was so quiet that you could hardly even hear the click of the lock, and this time we were really afraid that she would never come back. This time the silence was bigger than after the loudest bang. I ran to the window upstairs and looked out, but she had already gone around the corner out of sight. I thought I should run after her. But then I waited. The whole house waited for her to come back. And when she came at last, everybody was happy, even my father. He said he would never slam doors again as long as he lived.
My mother says it’s the hardest thing in the world to say that you’re wrong. She wants us not to be afraid to make mistakes, and, when we do our homework, never to use a rubber or tear a page out of the copy book. She wants everybody to honest and Onkel Ted comes out to the house specially because he’s a priest and he’s heard all the mistakes that have ever been made in Ireland. He always brings a book in German for my mother and you wouldn’t think he’s read it because it looks new. This time he brought a book about Eichmann and a book about a priest named Bonhöffer. They sat around the table in the breakfast room and didn’t come out because they had so much to talk about. We went into the front room instead to listen to the radio and there was a song we liked called ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. We listened to the radio with one ear and listened out for my father with the other, to hear if he was coming with one soft foot and one hard.
The next day, when my father was at work and we were at school, my mother went upstairs very quietly to her bedroom with lots of clean laundry. Bríd was still breathing up and down, so my mother sat her up in the big bed where she could look out and tell her everything that was happening outside on the street like a newsreader, who was going east and who was going west. She put the light on because it looked like it was getting dark outside and the red houses on the far side of the street said it was going to rain. Bríd said there was a man from the corporation slicing the weeds off the path with a shovel. Miss Tarleton came out and threw some more weeds out on to the path while the man wasn’t looking. And a dog came walking into our garden because the gate was open, but he just scratched the grass and went out again.
My mother opened up my father’s wardrobe and put away lots of clean shirts and rolled-up socks. She left the doors open and started looking at all the things that belonged to him before they got married. She found the picture of the sailor with his soft eyes looking away that my father never wanted anyone in our house to see again. She found other pictures of my grandfather when he worked on ships that belonged to the British navy. She found the last postcard he sent home to his wife saying: ‘More homesick than seasick.’ There were rosary beads belonging to my grandmother Mary Frances and a box full of letters and lots of medals she got from the navy after he died on his own in a Cork hospital. There were more boxes of letters from people in America and South Africa who couldn’t come home again. There were letters that Mary Frances wrote to my father when he was going to university in Dublin so that he would never have to leave Ireland and get seasick or have to work in America. Letters that my father wrote home to Leap to say that he got the money and a list of all the things he had to spend the money on, like the rent and razor blades and a penny for Mass on Sunday. Letters from his mother asking him to send home his clothes to Leap to be washed. Letters to ask him if he had heard anything from his brother Ted.
Bríd said it was raining and the man from the corporation left the shovel leaning against our wall. She said he was standing under the tree across the road taking shelter and smoking a cigarette. She said Mrs Robinson opened the door to hold her hand out and see if it was really raining, because there’s a clock in her hallway that tells the weather, but it’s not always right and you have to tap it with your finger. Bríd said it was raining hard now and there were big drops on the pavement and nobody on the street at all any more going east or west.
My mother sat on the floor and looked at photographs of my father before he was married. She found pictures of the time when Onkel Ted was becoming a priest and my father was becoming an engineer. She found German language lessons from Dr Becker and homework my father did. There were lots of things from the time during the war, when my father met Gearóid at university in Dublin and started the party called Aiséirí. There was a picture of my father walking down O’Connell Street at the head of a big march, holding a poster with the words: ‘For whom the bell tolls, Éire Aiséirí.’ There was another picture of my father and Gearóid in his tweed suit walking down Harcourt Street, smiling as if they were not afraid of the police.
There were boxes full of green leaflets to say what Aiséirí was going to do with Ireland if they were in control. They were going to stop people being greedy and getting rich on their own without sharing. People would not have to pay rent if they had to live with rats and not enough clothes or food for their children. Irish people would no longer have to go away and get seasick. They would get rid of all the things the British invented like county councils and slums and postboxes with the crown. They would take back all the things that belonged to the Irish, like the rivers and the big houses and the six counties in the north. It was time that the Irish took back the factories and the shops and put up the Irish word Amach on the doors in the cinemas instead of Exit. They were fed up with Irish people changing their minds all the time and not knowing how to start up a new country from the beginning. They said it was time for Irish people to stop sitting down and staring out the window as if they got an awful fright. What they needed was a big strong leader, not like Hitler or Stalin, but more like Salazar, because he was a good Catholic and Portugal was a small country like Ireland with stone walls and poor people living on their imagination.
My mother doesn’t understand very much about politics so she can’t tell the difference between the things that people say before elections. She knows they have nice hands and nice shoes and make lots of promises. She doesn’t understand what difference Aiséirí would have made if more people had thrown their hats up in the air for my father and not kept some of the things that the British left behind, like the trains and the courts and elections. She found notes for all the speeches on O’Connell Street, written in tiny handwritin
g on cards. But they made no sense. There were notes about laziness and blindness and immoral practices. Notes about greediness and money lending. Notes about bringing horses to the water and making them drink. About biting the hand that feeds you and rubbing salt into the wounds. There were notes about how silly it was to live in Ireland and not be Irish, notes about people still calling themselves British. People calling themselves Jewish, too. Notes about Jewish people giving Irish people carpets and making them pay for the rest of their lives. Leaflets about an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. One of the cards quoted a man named Belloc, asking if anybody had ever heard of such a thing as an Irish Jew. And then my mother found the newspaper that Gearóid was talking about. It was so old it was gone yellow and almost brown. The headline on the front page said: ‘Ireland’s Jewish problem’. The date on the top was 1946. There was a note in handwriting, too, from Gearóid saying: ‘doesn’t go far enough’.
When you’re small you know nothing and when you grow up there are things you don’t want to know. I don’t want anyone to know that my father wanted Jewish people in Ireland to speak Irish and do Irish dancing like everyone else. I don’t want people to know that he was foaming at the mouth. That the Irish language might be a killer language, too, like English and German. That my father believes you can only kill or be killed. It’s the hardest thing to say that you’re wrong.
One day when I was coming home from school I saw my father in the street. He was on his way home, too, buying a newspaper on O’Connell Street. He looked like a different man when he was outside, more like an ordinary Irishman going home from work, with his cap on and his briefcase in his right hand. I was standing beside a newspaper stand looking at all the books and the magazines. There was a book with a gun and a dead bird on the cover and I wanted to know what the story was inside. All the time the man was shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’, with the newspapers under his arm. There was an echo coming from across the street where another man was doing the same thing, shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ back. When somebody asked for a paper, the man quickly took one out from the bundle under his arm and held his hand out flat so that people could give him the money. They could take the paper out of his fingers and walk away home quickly without wasting any time. The man’s hand was black from the papers and there were black marks on his face.
The Speckled People Page 22