A Book of Death and Fish (30 page)

Most historical events seem to me to be a fine balance of intention and cock-up. Here’s one scenario, leaning towards the latter.

Her father needed to float that boat. He’d known his own father would really be in the boat with him, in spirit. All he had to do was to extend his evening stroll over a fence or two. Locate the vessel he’d sighted earlier and give it a shove out. But some twitchy guard saw him. This gangly, spotty, kid recited the rote-learned warning twice but the architect’s mind was engaged in acts of memory.

The man who was able to reason out his run before the advancing Red Army – and survived – was vulnerable in his own home territory. When the authorities discovered the guy they’d shot had quite some standing, they got a shock. Things were supposed to be opening up. They couldn’t tie it all up too neatly. So they followed the example of Mrs Thatcher’s British Government Ministers, in courts of law, and were ‘economical with the truth’.

Here’s another version. Even a story that is fixed, secure in its train of narrative detail, is different every time it’s told. And this one has very little fixed, except some background information which might be essential.

An eminent architect had been invited over to view certain designated sights. He knew he had to stick to the script. He couldn’t stray. He was reported as having behaved impeccably up to that critical point. The delegation had been touring a fine piece of Baltic minimalism. Sympathetic designers from Finland had worked with the Party to produce the hotel. Rest and recuperation for those with onerous duties. The new hotel was set back a safe interval from the dunes. For more than one reason. Forecasts
for erosion and encroachment suggested the need to allow a generous distance back from the water’s edge, if you were to think of a projected lifespan of at least a hundred years. That would be enough because there are of course some unfortunate precedents in buildings planned to last out a full glorious millennium.

And then of course there were the shanty villages of caravans and bothies for normal workers, erected closer to the water. A sensitive degree of separation was clearly required. So the great and good would not be disturbed by inquisitive eyes, looking to the shine of the new modernism.

Now we could all buy a ticket to swim in the trapped rays of winter sun, but it would have been private functions only when your father made his officially sanctioned visit.

These wide, triple-glazed windows looked seaward but the angles had been cleverly thought out. You wouldn’t see the line of watchtowers, close to the swaying tops of the pines.

Maybe the visitors really could believe that this was a sign of solid economic foundations. This was of course only the start of a building programme which would make that level of recreational and conference facility available to the many as well as to the few. Later.

At least one of these visitors from the West, however, had the mark of a survivor. As surely as if it had been inked under his living skin. Two youths from the architectural class of 1939 had been in it together. They had been transported across a continent, fought and then been rounded up together. This history had to be the key.

Gabriele’s father and his friend had heard the stories. If you went behind that wire in that camp you would not come out again. The two men had lived through fire from both sides by lying low during the day and sighting the plough in the night sky. Their angle on the pole star had taken them all the way across the desolate kilometres. But one man’s past life was still trapped here in Rügen.

I think he set a course, that dim night. He’d crossed more than one frontier by night, before. He’d emerged on the lucky side or at least the prosperous one. He hadn’t even needed to walk across a long bridge. The survivor has to live with guilt.

But to put his Rügen past behind him, he’d have to sail from it, alone, on his own wits. A black boat in a dark sea, criss-crossed by the wakes of all these ferries and cargo ships.

I’ll go for that story. It’s like diving down the stairwell, in a solid apartment block in Turin, the very house where he was raised before the madness of fascism struck. That’s what Primo Levi did. Or probably did. How can anyone know, for sure? Maybe he’d only kept everything together till he’d borne witness to all the things it was possible for a human being to tell.

It was me now, lying awake, trying not to move about. Gabriele had found the sleep she needed. It was worth two ferries and a long drive for that.
The Periodic Table,
in English, was lying unopened on the table, her side. She’d come late to bed after waiting up, drinking pear schnapps with her brother, when the rest of us had sloped off. Nothing was resolved but they had now held their wake.

We’d have one collective family walk on New Year’s Day, out past the empty
Sekt
bottles and spent fireworks. Some said, this one, ’98 to ’99, was the real Millennium? And others said it was 2000–2001. Was that logic or maths? Where’s the logic in the arbitrary marking of time, anyway? Hang on though, there’s a bit of astronomy and natural physics involved. Difficult to argue with the sun and the moon. Shit, a party’s a party.

The Caspar David Freidrich cliffs were reflecting the light, casting it back seaward. The flints in the shingle shimmered. The cousins were sifting for fossilised octopus. Sure enough, the brown tentacles were recognisable. You hoped for amber. It only took time for all these animal bodies to stop being so sinister. A bit unfair on left-handed folk, that continuing extension of meaning. Casting nasturtiums. But that’s how language is.

We were stopped by the cops on our way home. A bored Sunday morning officer in Berwick-upon-Tweed when we drove in to hunt down bacon and eggs.

‘This car’s overloaded,’ he said. ‘What do you have in it?’

‘Usual stuff,’ I said.

‘Open up the boot,’ he said.

He just looked at me when he saw all these weathered bricks, the fruits of old Rügen, washed by the Baltic, sharp edges muted.

‘Usual stuff for him,’ Anna said. The two sage folks exchanged long-suffering looks and the cop just said to take it easy, up the road.

Back on the Island, we made a winter walk in similar bright conditions. We didn’t go Griomsiadair way but out from Melbost, the beach behind the airport. It’s still a civilian installation. We kept Nato out. Don’t know exactly where these old bricks came from but there’s plenty, washed by Broad Bay. Stamped ‘Lewis Brick’.

Anna helped me with the mortar work. ‘You’re just doing this because you’re too proud to play Lego any more,’ she said. That was about right. The Morsø stove was imported to Lewis from the Danish Baltic islands. They sell hundreds a year, in SY. We were careful to alternate the Rügen and Lewis bricks in the surround. But, within that scheme, all these random variations in the tones looked fine.

Charlie’s wife was a very understanding woman but now that the four chimneys were only dimly remembered ghosts and the roof was fixed, would there be any chance at all of a clear up? There was the Audi and the one for bits. There was also the Lada. I remembered the conversations. Charlie’s opposite number at the watch changeover winding him up, as you do, and Charlie coming back with the line, ‘Aye, but I own my Lada. The bank owns your Ford.’

We’d done the concrete paths and the weathershield paint on Charlie’s house. And my VW (Type 3) van had shining, resprayed flanks and was running sweetly. That was a lot of hours prep before the paint job. I was still owing him. So we had a boys’ day out with Anna as an honorary member of the club and she said, years after, it was one of the best days she’d ever had, running dead cars to the dump, one after the other.

It started off with a boat-job since we had the big van on hire and the towbar had both types of fitting. So we took the dinghy, rebuilt in a colleague’s garage, along Newton, the gang of three of us in the front. Charlie said, ‘Oh look, some poor bastard’s lost a wheel.’ As we watched it rolling past us.

There was that second’s delay before the crunching of the collapsed trailer sent sparks we couldn’t see but could imagine all too well.

Our little breakdown was not a kick in the arse off a break in the seawall where the remains of a concrete slipway survive. There was a bit of collapsing here and there but it was no worse than the other slip at the far side of the harbour. We just hailed a passer-by. The flashers went on and the dinghy came off the trailer and onto the slip to wait for the tide. Just as if we’d planned it.

‘Now Anna,
a ghràidh,
you are at present accompanying no less than two coastguard officers on an off-watch mission. Both of us are completely capable of forgetting to come back to row that dinghy to the mooring at High Water so please dear, remind us gentlemen.’

She repeated ‘gentlemen’ with a question mark added. Then she nodded and the deal was done. The doctrine of shared responsibility. Good working practice.

So next it was the Lada. And we got a hold of trailer number two. This was a proper one for moving sick and dead vehicles. It’s called an ambulance, in the trade. We agreed it was better to recover the boat trailer from the side of the road first. So we did that and the damage wasn’t terminal by any means but a job for another day. We just left it in Charlie’s back yard, though we were clearing up.

There’s a lot of adrenalin in steering a Lada. That occurs when there isn’t a seat and it’s getting towed and you’re steering. Then you realise the scraping is coming from the trailing driveshaft which is sending a regular hail of sparks for a wider arc than you would think possible. And you remember Charlie saying that the petrol tank isn’t disconnected yet and, thank God, Anna’s riding shotgun in the towing van but they must be bantering because they’re slow to realise that their father and watchmate respectively is holding for his life with one arm and waving for his life with the other.

I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared. But we all survived. The standard Lewisian repair of twists of galvanised fence-wire sufficed to tie up the shaft. The rain of sparks stopped and we reached the dump without incident. These were the former days. When the council boys were so grateful that you took in old vehicles, instead of abandoning them out peat roads, that they didn’t make you complete multiple forms, drain off all liquids and oils and pay several fees.

So next was Audi number two and that was amazing because a guy just showed up. He’d been phoning for a while and he lived just out the peninsula. So Charlie said, ‘We agreed fifty notes for the bits you wanted. Give us sixty now and we’ll deliver the whole thing for you right to your door.’ And that’s what we did. But the day was getting on. Since Anna was along for the hurl, we couldn’t just work on because we’d be sure to
get reminded about lunch and stuff like that. And then there was the state of the tide to remember. You thought we were going to forget, didn’t you? But we didn’t and Anna rowed that boat to a running mooring for us and that was another tick.

So the light was just beginning to go when the final carcass of Audi number one was secure on the ambulance. If the last shall be first then this was the appropriate order of events. But it involved a fair amount of improvisation with several different jacks. And then we realised that even that lot wasn’t going to solve our problem. So three sharp minds went to work. One of them had a good grasp of wheeled transport from the beginnings of a self-taught bilingual approach to life. Anna’s early grammar was made up of composites of German and English so ‘auto’ was pretty much her first word.

Then I heard her say ‘auto-shoes’, which got me thinking till I saw her looking at roller skates. One day, from her car-seat, she said ‘auto-see-saw’. I couldn’t figure out that one, so I ended up doing a wee U-turn and looking back along the route. The Peel’s crane was at work on a site by the road. Auto-see-saw.

And one of us had the advantage of a very good pass in O-grade Physics behind him. And Charlie was just bloody sharp, full stop. The logistics of vehicle removal were proving as much of a challenge as the dismantling of chimneys. See chimneys, when they’re not on your own house, everyone is brave. Just put a rope on it and tow it with the tractor. It’s got to come down. Aye, but it might not come down in bite-sized harmless portions. And the mass could fall the wrong way and gain velocity as it went. So we played Lego with scaffolding. I’m not sure our tower would have been approved by a missing old mate of mine who really was qualified in this subject. We took turns, nibbling into the tough, poured concrete, with a heavy Kango hammer. Good vibrations.

But the gang was getting tired, the day of the dead cars. The crack was still good but we’d all quietened down. We faced one more obstacle. The ambulance’s turning circle was just that bit too wide for the turning place at the entrance to the dump. The gates of course were locked now. No-one likes a loose end after a good day’s play.

Two young dudes drove up right then. They’d come by for a spruchle through the skip, outside the wire, to see if anything was worth salvaging. And their eyes lit up when they saw the Audi. Charlie is a good judge of human nature and said, ‘A fiver and she’s yours.’

Even Anna gave him a look. But these lads could look after themselves. ‘Aye, but weren’t you going to dump it?’

‘I cannot tell a lie,’ Charlie said, at the closed gates of said dump. And then they said, ‘Tell you what, that’s the ambulance from Lava’s garage, isn’t it? We’ve used it before. So what about we take this off your hands now? Get the trolley back to the cove in the morning and everything’s cool.’

So that’s what happened and it’s very likely that the Audi made a mechanical version of the Lazarus trick. With some help from some talented skip-raiders.

But let us not forget that all our collective efforts could serve only to prolong the individual history of that Audi. Like the raising of Lazarus himself, only a postponement of the inevitable was possible. It wouldn’t be immortal. I remember this point from the days when I was a believer.

And fair’s fair, one of the guys who argued for looking at the real significance behind the miraculous was Abdu’l Bahá – son of the main prophet figure in the Bahá’í Faith. I don’t know if I told you he gave public talks in Paris in 1912. On the sixth of January in 1913, he stayed in a fine family manse in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, before delivering a similar talk. The rebirth of a man who was spiritually dead was more significant than the walk of a dead man. If I told you he was invited by the wife of a Free Church minister, you would probably think I was telling stories. So I am. But that’s what the recorded information says.

So nearly six months after the Titanic dived down deep, bringing several millionaires and many of the poor of Ireland down with her, a prisoner freed by the Young Turks revolution gave public talks to argue for the establishment of a New World Order. And before July was over, the following year, the mechanised war would explode and take all these lads from all these villages and cities and crofts and fine houses. My grandfather would be one of those who failed to return from it. A dim figure from the village of Griomsiadair was only one of the many lost
from the
Iolaire
(formerly
Amaltha
) on New Year’s night, 1919.

And of course that chain of events which became the Great War would set in motion the punitive settlement and the circumstances which would let that bitter and believing, small dark man send out all that rhetoric. Members of the Bahá’í Faith did not suffer as badly as Jewish people, gypsies and homosexuals during the Nazi period though the faith was disbanded by an order signed by Himmler. No official meetings were held. The alternative was to sign up to a policy of expelling any members of the Faith from a Jewish background.

But in Iran the State is still involved in prosecutions of Bahá’ís, amongst others, for holding to the belief of a minority in that region. Images of the destruction of Bahá’í cemeteries evoke images of similar destruction of Jewish sites in Europe since the 9th of November, 1938. And of course we can’t discuss the treatment of Buddhists in occupied Tibet because of our economic trading deals. Maybe they’re also called ‘treaties’ now.

Back to resurrections. Audi, or Auto Union as it was then, already had the badge of four interlocked rings to symbolise merged companies. Of course their production lines were used for the war effort and of course they were bombed. The company was reincarnated in East Germany as a State enterprise. In West Germany, VW took over Audi in 1966.

Charlie told me that the DKW was a more popular car than the Beetle, just before the war. He told Anna where the name came from –
Dampf-Kraft-Wagen
– and asked her to guess why. She first guessed that this was a wagon, made in the damp. Then she asked if it needed damp to work.

‘Think of power, think of pistons,’ Charlie said.

‘Steam?’

‘Steam.’

Before they became the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world, DKW produced a light, steam-driven car. So the famous supercharged four-stroke in the Audi Quattro is only one in a continuing series of reincarnations. And there is still a dispensation for historic two-strokes to leave their blue-grey lines of vapour across a large part of Europe. A guy brought one, powering a Trabant, back to Lewis, about 1994. Thank the Lord, that one didn’t end up in Charlie’s drive.