The Speckled People (18 page)

You stand behind the puppet theatre with the puppet in your hand, completely hidden. Nobody knows you’re there. Then you pull on the string to open the curtains and make the puppet walk out in front of the audience. You can say anything you want. You can change your voice and make up any story. You can hide behind the story, and it’s a bit like being underwater because everything you say goes up like bubbles to the surface.

‘Have you seen the dog?’ Kasper the puppet asks.

‘What dog?’ the puppet man answers.

‘The dog that has no name and belongs to nobody and barks all day until he’s hoarse and has no voice any more?’

My mother helps us to make up a story. She goes upstairs to get the hairdryer. She takes out a thin blue scarf from her dressing table and when she comes back down she goes in behind the puppet theatre with me. She plugs in the hairdryer and the blue scarf starts crashing on to the beach and the dog starts barking and biting at the waves because he doesn’t know any better.

Everybody has a story to hide behind, my mother says. In the vegetable shop one day, Mr Smyth started talking to her about a wall in Germany. He doesn’t normally talk very much, but that day he was talking about a wall and
that nobody had any courage left to stop it. Then he asked her when she was going back home to Germany, but she gave the oldest answer in Ireland and said she didn’t know. Missersmiss, she calls him, because of her accent. He asked me if I had ever been to Germany. The little German boy who has never been to Germany, he said, and even though he only has one arm, he’s able to keep talking and put the potatoes in a brown bag and take the money all with one hand. I wanted to know why he only has one arm and what story he was hiding behind, but we can’t ask those questions. Sometimes he uses his chin to hold things like an extra hand. He picks up the bag of potatoes against his hip and slips it into my mother’s net shopping bag. He said Germany was very far away. He spoke as if he had been there once himself, but couldn’t say any more because of his missing arm. And my mother just kept looking at the Outspan letters hanging in the window, until Mr Smyth said ‘please God’, it would not be long before she could go back to Germany. He said he had brothers and sisters in America who would give anything to come back to Ireland even for a day.

Other people started talking about the wall and asking the same questions. After Mass one day, a woman whose name was Miss Ryan asked my mother about going home and she said she wasn’t even dreaming about it. But that’s not true because, later on, she said it felt as though people in Ireland knew what you were thinking, long before you even thought of it yourself. Before you opened the door to go outside, they knew what was on your mind, even something you had already put out of your head for good. She made up a story to hide behind and said she was nowhere more at home than in Ireland with her family.

Everybody knows how far away Germany is by looking
at our family. They know that my mother is homesick. They can see it in her eyes. They could see her dreaming again that morning. They could see us all from the back, standing at the seafront, looking out at the waves, until my mother heard the bells and remembered what time it was and what country she was in. On the way back, my mother was trying not to step on the cracks in the pavement. I was hiding in doorways and she was pretending that she didn’t know where I was. Maria was talking to herself and stopping to point at a spot on the wall. Ita was smiling and saying ‘thank you’ to all the lamp-posts and gates. Franz went ahead and waited at the corner for us with his scooter, one foot on and one foot off, while Maria was still trailing far behind. Maybe we look like the children who are always thinking of home. The homesick children.

Outside the church the next day, Miss Ryan stopped to speak to my mother again and asked if she wanted to borrow the money to go back to Germany. There would be no rush in paying it back, she said, but my mother shook her head. They were whispering for a long time until all the people had left the church, until Miss Ryan told my mother to go home and have a think about it. But my father didn’t want that. He says you can’t borrow money from the neighbours and he doesn’t want my mother to go home on her own because she might never want to return.

My mother said it was time to stop dreaming. Instead, she asked her sisters to send over lots of books and magazines about Germany so that she could tell us what was happening there. She showed us the pictures of people running through the streets with suitcases. She explained how the Russians had put up a wall right in the middle of Germany and there was nothing the British or the Americans could do except watch. There was lots of
barbed wire and tanks in the middle of the streets. There were people climbing out the window and letting children down slowly on ropes. And when the wall was built, people still tried to escape to the other side but they were shot and there were pictures of them lying on the ground bleeding to death and nothing anyone could do to help.

Onkel Ted came to talk to my mother because she didn’t know what to do. She told him that Miss Ryan offered her money to go back to Germany and that she would not have to pay it back or ever mention it again. There were two Miss Harts and two Miss Doyles and two Miss Ryans, and they always went to Mass in pairs on Sunday. The Miss Ryans said they had set aside the money as a gift, but my father didn’t want money from the neighbours. After dinner and after the sweets in Onkel Ted’s pocket, we went to bed and they sat in the front room until there was nothing more to say about it. I heard my father taking out the cognac and putting on some music. It was the record of the two women doing a duet in French. I could hear the sound of the two high voices, like two sisters singing together. I thought it was like the two Miss Ryans going up the stairs together, arm in arm, up one or two steps and then back down two steps, then up three or four more and back down two, until they finished on the landing at the top with their arms around each other, saying goodnight and lying down softly in their beds.

After that, Onkel Ted was only afraid that my mother was homesick so he started sending her more books and pieces about Germany cut out of newspapers. He wrote long letters, too, in German and she wrote letters back, but my father said that had to stop, because he didn’t want Onkel Ted to be her friend for life, only himself. He didn’t want anyone to know more about Germany or to read any
more books than he did. He was able to read five books at the same time with a bus ticket sticking out of each one, but Onkel Ted was able to read so fast that he didn’t need a bus ticket and a book still looked brand new when he passed it on to my mother. My father didn’t like my mother reading books that he didn’t read first himself. He didn’t like her talking too much to the neighbours either or getting friendly with people in the shops or going to coffee mornings and getting ideas from other people, only Catholic ideas. He was afraid she would not listen to him any more. He started slamming all the doors in the house because he didn’t like anyone else calling her Irmgard. And one time there was a French woman living on our street who kept dropping in and talking to my mother. Even though they were from different countries, they had the same questions and the same answers when they talked. She wanted to become my mother’s friend for life, but my father stopped all that because she was talking about going back to France to get a divorce from her Irish husband who was friends for life with other women. That was the worst thing that could happen, if Irish people started getting French ideas. That would be the end of the family. That would be the end of Ireland, he said.

Then Onkel Ted sent Eileen Crowley out to talk to my mother instead. Her father PJ had a good business in Dublin, but his shop had to close down when he lent a friend some money and never got it back. They went into debt and had to sell everything and move house. My mother knew how bad that was, because her father had to close his shop, too, in Kempen. It was bad luck. My mother saw it as a failure, and Eileen would never call it that. They had different ways of seeing things. Even different words that led to misunderstandings. Maybe there was no failure in
Ireland, only bad luck, and maybe there was no bad luck in Germany, only failure. They were friends, and Eileen was good at helping people out of trouble. My mother didn’t want our family to be a failure, because this was the last chance she had in her life. It would be her own fault if she was back on the streets of Germany with suitcases and children, like the people running away across the Berlin Wall. The family was a good story to hide behind and so she said it was time to stop dreaming. She went over to the Miss Ryans to put an end to it once and for all. She told them it was very kind of them to offer the money, but there were other people who might need it more, people who had nothing even to dream about, people who had nowhere even to be homesick for.

After that, everything was back to normal. The doors stopped slamming and my mother started writing in her diary every day because that’s your only real friend for life. She collected lots more pictures of what happened in Germany. In some places, she said, the wall went right through the middle of a house, so that the back of the house was in one part of Germany and the front of the house was in the other. She showed us pictures of all the planes bringing food to Berlin and pictures of John F. Kennedy in the city. She said it was great to hear John F. Kennedy saying that he was a Berliner, because most American people were afraid to be German and changed their names from Busch to Bush and Schmidt to Smith and maybe you can’t blame them.

Every day we played with the puppets and my mother said we would put on a play for our relatives and invite all the neighbours, too. We stayed inside to practise the play about the dog barking at the waves. There was even a book in our house about staying indoors. It was about what to do if an atom bomb fell anywhere near us like
it did on Hiroshima. There would be nuclear radiation all around the streets. The radiation was always shown with red dots, like a disease in the air. It explained how to build a nuclear shelter, how to put sandbags in all the windows so you could stay inside living on tins of beans for a few years until the red dots were all gone again.

One day, Eileen brought Franz and me up to the top of Nelson’s Pillar and my father said nothing, even though it was something the British left behind. When we came home, Onkel Ted was there with sweets in his pocket and we told him that we were going to put on a play for relatives and neighbours. He said it was a very fine idea and Eileen said we were full of talent. At the dinner table that night, my mother told a story about a family who had a puppet theatre under the Nazis. The father was afraid to say anything against Hitler. He was afraid that the children would go out and there would be trouble if they repeated what he said on the street. So every day they put on a puppet show in the evening after dinner, just for themselves. He would go in behind the puppet theatre with his children and make up story about a very bad man named Arnulf. And at the end of every play they always had to find a way to kill Arnulf, so that the other puppets were safe again.

‘Remarkable,’ Onkel Ted said.

He nodded his head slowly and said it was a great sign that people had courage. He had read lots of books about people like that, books that make you feel strong. There are no German songs that make you feel strong in your stomach but there are stories like that. Eileen was nodding because she was chewing a toffee in her mouth and my father had nothing to say either. They all just quietly swallowed the story and the room was silent.

My mother tells stories like that because there are other stories she can’t tell. When it’s silent, she thinks of all the things she has to keep secret. She wishes that she could have resisted more. For a minute, she sits there and everybody is waiting for her to tell another story. She is thinking about how she is trapped in Ireland now and how she was trapped in Germany once, and how nothing has changed. She wishes that she had thought of the puppet show killing Arnulf.

My mother was back in Düsseldorf, back in the same office, working as if nothing had happened. Nobody asked questions and she had no idea who to talk to now. One night, Stiegler even invited her out to the theatre again with his wife, as if it was all fine, as if the world could just go on as before. Frau Stiegler kissed her on the cheek as always, and it was like a cosy family, with everybody very happy not to say a word that might make things uncomfortable. My mother can’t remember what the play was. She can only remember the lip biting and the helpless anger. She was thinking only about what happened in Venlo and how she wanted to go away and work somewhere else in a different place. She wanted never to see Stiegler again. She wanted a new life, maybe even in a new country. She even thought of running away and going into hiding because of the shame she might bring to her family if the story came out. She sat in the theatre with Stiegler in the middle and Frau Stiegler on the far side, dressed with a scarf made of fox, with fox eyes and fox paws hanging down. It was only at the interval, when Herr Stiegler left them alone for a moment, that my mother had the courage to say something.

‘I think there is something you should know,’ she said. ‘About your husband.’

So then Frau Stiegler stared and listened to what happened in Venlo. It was hard to describe it in words, but my mother said Herr Stiegler must have planned it all and she could do nothing to stop it.

‘What?’ Frau Stiegler said, and it was like a little bark that the fox on her shoulders was making. She had angry eyes and my mother thought at last that there was somebody on her side again. Everything was going to be put right again. But, instead, Frau Stiegler looked at her with vicious eyes. The fox, too, as if they were not angry at Herr Stiegler at all, but at her. Maybe my mother was too polite. Maybe she didn’t have words bad enough in her head to describe what happened to her. She didn’t have a way of telling things that was ugly enough to describe Herr Stiegler and what he did, because Frau Stiegler just turned on her instead. It was as if she had started it all and Herr Stiegler was innocent. As if she had brought it all on herself and he could do no wrong.