They did a range of tests. I sat up in a hospital bed on the first floor, by the window. A team of doctors swept in. They talked about me in the third person, a character in their novel, I had to surrender.
They put a name on my condition – sarcoidosis. It sounded like they were making it up out of their heads.
It explained everything, the silence, the shrugging, fear, fatigue, the inability to feel at home, restless nights walking around the city, retreating from society, the wish to know nothing, to remember nothing, outbursts of male aggression followed by intense spells of remorse and remaining indoors. They told me there was no known cause and no cure. For a while it was believed to be triggered by the sap of pine trees, possibly the scent of pine in detergents, floor polish, air fresheners hanging from the rear-view mirror in cars, those sachets that turn the flushing water in the loo green. That was soon ruled out as well. It remained clinically unresolved. It might be described as a fungus, but they could not identify any spores. It affected mostly the lungs and the joints, the nerve endings, patients often presented with swollen knees or swollen elbows, calcium deposits under the fingernails, the retina. The range of symptoms could be varied and elusive, some people burned it off without diagnosis, it remained latent. A progressive disease that led to death in the past, now it could be controlled by cortisone.
Nothing more was known about the condition, they told me. Did it have to do with motion, migration, people not living where they came from? Some research studies carried out among population groups around the world would indicate that it predominantly affected Irish people and African Americans and Jewish people.
Helen came in with Rosie and Essie and the baby. One of the other patients dragged over a chair for her. She took out a pineapple and some tangerines. The nurses from accident and emergency came up to have a look at the baby, a boy in a hurry, they called him. The girls wanted to draw the privacy curtain but there was no need.
It might have been the steroids, they had me on a high dose, the consultant said – we’re going to hit this hard. I was bursting with happiness. I was full of gratitude. They would not allow me to go and live in Canada, but I wanted to thank the immigration authorities at the embassy for sorting out my mouth. They had solved the mystery of my silence. They had rescued me, they had freed me from my speckled condition. Now I could deal with anything. Helen said I had a big round face. Rosie and Essie were arranging the bedside locker as though I was settling down for good, they had brought me a pair of tartan slippers, I laughed – slippers?
When they were gone I stared at the small hill my feet made under the blue blanket. I could not help remembering a bar myself and Helen used to go to in Berlin. We loved the place, even though Helen found it too smoky. It was in a triangular building, on a corner site. We went to hear a harmonica player from Cuba, he had incredible lungs, he could hold a note for ages, like one of those pearl divers able to stay underwater for five minutes, longer, it took nothing out of him. When he finished a solo, he held the harmonica at the side of his mouth like a cigar while he clapped a backbeat and sang his heart out.
My lung-envy.
I didn’t even hear the tea trolley coming.
Tea, love? Biscuit, love?
They left a mug of tea and two biscuits on the mobile tray and pushed it towards me – there you are love. I listened to the trolley moving on, the progress of cups ringing along the corridor going further and further away had a joy attached to it. This was a good time for me. I was going to get better. I was going to be able to speak. I was getting to know a lot of patients. Six of us in the ward, all in for pulmonary investigations, this small nation of lung casualties living under one roof.
Each one of them was me.
The man by the door on my side was silent, he lay on his bed in a dressing gown. His wife came and sat with him for an hour, they didn’t speak much, then he went back to waiting for her again. He must have spent a lifetime on cortisone, the flesh under his chin was hanging, his eyes were bulging, his skin was thin as tissue paper, even a light knock against the end of the bed would give him a purple bruise. The man in the centre bed on the far side was attached to a plastic bag hanging from a steel rod on wheels – my mobile crozier, he called it. At one point, he got up and said he was going out for a smoke. In the other end bed, the man had a late visitor, maybe his brother, they were talking about fixing something together, a bathroom, moving the sink to the far side where it wouldn’t be getting in the way. The man by the window opposite me had grown up by the sea. He got quite emotional and said he wanted all his life to go back to where he was brought up, he missed the blue space in front of him. Before going to sleep, he was given a glass of warm milk. He drank the milk and ate two marshmallows, sitting on the side of the bed with his legs swinging. He had done this ever since he was a boy. Then he woke up an hour later coughing with homesickness. It was impossible to sleep. The cortisone. The snoring. The light in the corridor. The man next to me was gone mad with steroids, he got up and started dragging the blue blanket off my bed, then he gathered up the blankets from the other patients already asleep and piled them on the floor, the nurses had to come and put him back into his bed, they strapped him in.
Six men, six human clocks, each breath, each cough a measurement of time.
During the night, we were all coughing at once. It might have been a toothbrush falling on the floor that set us off. We were like dogs in a small mountain village outdoing each other. Coughing and barking to show who was the best. Everyone saying – I’m a better cougher than the lot of you. One person went quiet to allow the next person a solo fit, somebody else broke in with a raucous cough from the other end, then we all came back in a combined chorus, coughing everything our lungs had to offer before the ward finally went silent again.
A pair of lungs with rooms, a hall, a staircase, a window looking out onto a flat roof. An X-ray would show the layout underneath the floorboards, the wiring, the heating pipes, layers of memory and scars from childhood. I walk in and out of these lungs, the front door is wide open, the wind blows in, the draught makes a hum, one of the inner doors slams shut. I carry boxes out, most of the stuff goes into a big yellow skip outside.
Now and then I come across things that cannot be thrown out. A box of drawings. A shoe carton full of photographs. Lumberjack coats they no longer wear but I have become attached to. All of Helen’s stuff. The butterflies. The garden shears turned into antlers. Wooden bits I have carved, the ear, the mouth, the singers and the listeners, we call them. Other body parts that are not eligible for display, a nose I have started in limewood with the nostrils not hollowed out yet, a set of blind eyes open.
And the sick bowl, how can I throw out the sick bowl?
And my journal. All those notes and bits of paper with descriptions of people I had encountered. Some lengthy passages about being alone. Alongside the continuous family log, things the children said, things Helen told me, happy, uneventful stuff I could not leave behind.
Most of the things are stored in boxes and brought to the new place we’re renting temporarily. A small town house, Helen likes it because it’s warm and well insulated, the children like it because they can play on the street, there is a fountain and lots of trees, fallen branches they can collect. I like it because nobody can find me.
While I am clearing the house, people stop to ask where we are going. I tell them nothing, only that I’m getting rid of a couple of things, unbelievable the amount of junk you collect. One of the neighbours tells me how his dog got run over at the corner outside our house, the children on the street ran up to him saying – mister, your dog is dead, the postman still believes the dog is alive and continues to be afraid of the dog as he delivers the mail every morning. And the local grocery shop, when I go to pay off a couple of things, I tell the shopkeeper we’re moving, he gives me a bar of chocolate each for the girls.
I work late.
There is an echo in the rooms, a hollow sound that seems false, there is no such thing as an empty house. I can hear myself breathing. Whistling. I go around dismantling the remaining bits of memory and find a children’s book hidden behind the bath, curled up with the steam. A book in which the boy character goes on a trip at night to the country of monsters. Their faces are full of comic exaggeration, their teeth are jagged. I had started comparing the creatures in the book to Rosie and Essie, holding the wild faces up to theirs, matching monster teeth with the gaps in their smiles. At some point, they refused to open their mouths for me, they must have hidden the book.
Many of the other non-functional projects have got to be abandoned at that point. In the front garden lie some components gathered to assemble the short stretch of railway line. So far, I have only the sleepers and some of the metal fixings, along with a mound of hardcore stones ready to be laid out for the base. I have been given prices for the sections of disused rail and the buffer stop. For months, I have been on the phone to my contact at the rail company, we leave messages for each other, we talk about logistics, the transport costs. I have a reasonable estimate for the manpower needed to extract the parts from the rail yard and have them delivered to the house. The only thing left is to source one of the signal pylons, the old version I want with the flap falling to a forty-five degree angle is still widely in use, they are slowly being replaced, so it’s a matter of waiting until one of them becomes available.
I spend a long time in the bedroom looking at the sea. The beam of light reaches into the bare room. The lighthouse will not allow me to move. I force myself to leave, like I need to be taken by the arm, somebody to pull me away and escort me down the stairs, out of the house.
We were all there. My three sisters, Gabriela, Greta and Lotte, gathered in the room. My brother Gerd got back from Germany, my mother held his hand for a long time. My little brother Emil was on a cycling tour in northern Spain, he was on his way, Greta asked my mother to hold on. The doctor on the corner came in to speak to Greta about the medication, he left the dosing up to her to manage. The house was full of laughing, we talked about the things that made my mother laugh, the language contradictions that she loved. We laughed about nothing. Helen was there. Rosie and Essie came. Baby Donal was in the room with my mother for a moment, then they were all looked after downstairs in the kitchen by a cousin. It was not long, just after Emil arrived, we were together around the bed and I heard my mother speaking in a low voice with her eyes open – I’m ready. I heard Greta say the words – we’re all here now.
The house was full of crying and praying. Helen put her arms around me. She then went around the room to embrace each of the others.
My sisters stayed with my mother and got her ready, Gabriela placed rose petals around her, Lotte found there was still warmth under her arms, Greta closed her eyes and placed a rolled-up cloth under her chin. The doctor came back. Our uncle the Jesuit arrived. Gerd spoke to the undertaker, a group of five men came in carrying the coffin, the lid separately. To get around the return on the stairs, they had to reverse into the room on the first-floor landing before continuing up to the next landing, this had been done many times before with furniture, beds, tables, a bookcase, the wardrobes. The door of my room flew open, the coffin was pointed inside, enough to clear the landing, then it was brought forward again up the stairs into the room at the front of the house where my mother lay. We heard them moving around, their feet heavy, their deep voices. They were there for a good while. We were standing in the hall when they came back down, the lid was on the coffin.
This time, when they reached the first-floor landing, the coffin was brought all the way inside the room where they could turn the direction and continue leading with her feet first. One of the men went backwards down the stairs with his hand on the front of the coffin to guide it. The coffin descended at an angle, I could hear the men breathing, then it levelled out as they reached the hall. They rested the coffin on a pair of trestles in the hallway and my uncle the Jesuit said some prayers, we kneeled, the men stood with their hands clasped. The coffin was carried out the front door, down the two granite steps, out along the path, through the gate being held open for her by my brother Gerd. On the street they straightened out to face the back of the hearse with the door open and slid the coffin along the steel floor. There was a small gathering of neighbours on the pavement, they were blessing themselves. When the hearse drove off, the house was silent, I thought they had taken my mother back to Germany, it was the only place I could think of her going, back to where she was from.
What came to mind at that moment was the German word – Flecken. The word my mother used to describe a stain, a smudge, a blot, a soiled spot on a shirt or a coat. But it was also the word used to describe a place, a piece of earth, a smudge on the map, a little fleck of ground you have taken to heart and want to go back to.
In English, you might call it a grand spot. Our street with the big corner house. It had one of those palm trees in the front garden. The sun shone so bright, we never noticed the tree itself, only the shadow of straight black leaves dancing on the white gable wall.
It was August. The house was full of flowers. We had no idea how to grieve. We didn’t know what to say when people came around to let us know they were sorry. At the funeral, I met people I had not seen since I was a child. Their handshakes made me feel I had been away for a long time, somebody asked me was I living in Berlin now. I was overwhelmed when they remembered my name. People who knew my mother well, they felt close to her, they loved her accent, her way of dressing in European clothes, talking about Ireland with such affection, like a newcomer who had just arrived.
My little brother Emil was there shaking hands with all the mourners. I could not help thinking about the time he was electrocuted. Up in my mother and father’s bedroom. He must have been only five then, inquisitive, going through the wardrobes looking for clues. My mother told him to keep singing, so she could tell where he was. He stood by the table with the bedside lamp, the song about two frogs jumping into the water together. Under the fringe of tassels, his hand went up along the smooth marble stem to find the switch. The light failed to come on. His fingers reached into the opening at the top where the bulb was meant to be. The current rushing through him was like a slap across the chest. It threw him across the room. My mother knew there was something wrong because he had stopped singing. He woke up in her arms as she ran down the stairs, shaking the dead boy out of him, kissing his forehead. His hand was burning red. At the hospital, they grafted on a piece of skin taken from his leg. The patch is still visible, a different shade, the shape of a country stuck on, it looks like Australia.
Helen’s uncle came back over from London. Uncle Jerome. He went around to shake everyone’s hand like a member of the family. He spoke to the other mourners. They remembered my mother on the street with my father, he was determined to keep moving, stepping from one foot to the other, while she stopped to smile and exchange a few words.
At the cemetery, I could not remember the coffin going into the ground, I was distracted by thoughts of her life, how easily she laughed at what was hard. After the burial, we came back to the house. It was just the family that evening, in the dining room around the table. My brothers and sisters, Helen, the children. And Uncle Jerome.
He made sure my mother got an Irish funeral.
He told every story he knew. Lots of jokes I never heard before. He had facts about history we never thought possible. The coal mines in Germany being discovered by an Irishman, the submarine invented by a man from Tralee in his back garden, the German philosopher who came to Ireland and was driven mad by barking dogs. Lots of facts about movies and famous actors getting married and divorced and married again. He told us about the greatest known geographical contradiction, a place in Wexford where you pedal your lungs out going down the hill, the gravity keeps pulling you back up again. He said the poem about a man travelling all the
way around the world in search of the most beautiful spot only to be told it was in a place he never thought of looking, back home in Tipperary. He sang the September song. He stood up for it. When he was halfway through he began to collapse. He tried holding on to a chair, but it gave way and fell over with a slap on the floor, his fingers grabbed the table, some cutlery flew around him. We got up to help him, but he continued sinking, he came to rest under the table, singing the final words on his back.
It was the biggest wedding in history. The wedding of the world. Guests from all countries, people celebrating in every corner of the earth. Thousands gathered on both sides, crowds standing on top of the wall, cheering, helping each other up. Some of them chipping away at the cement, carving holes into the wall so they could look through. People waving, kissing, crying. November. The Berlin Wall is open. Nobody can really believe it. The news is everywhere. Repeated images of people rushing through the barriers, the smiles, the shock of disbelief in their eyes. The same images shown over and over to make sure they can be true. People storming the offices of the Stasi state security, demanding to see their files, the prison where dissidents were held is abandoned, a newspaper left behind on the desk like a moment in history standing still while the world lurches forward into a new time. A man walks into a library to bring back a book he borrowed before the wall went up.
I was free to go on a journey to find the places where my mother had been during the war. Salzburg, the train station where she had been arrested. Prague, the castle overlooking the city where she was held captive in the basement. On the streets of Prague, the silent revolution had just begun to break out, people were gathering on the main square, a quiet confidence was growing. It felt to me that the world had been placed in the freezer all these years, since the end of the war, now it had been brought out to warm up in the sun.
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