The Speckled People (19 page)

‘If I hear another word of this,’ Frau Stiegler said, ‘if you say a single word to me or to anyone about this, I will call the police instantly. I will not have my husband’s reputation destroyed like this before my own eyes. Herr Stiegler is a good man, a respectable man, and how dare you even think up such a thing.’

They even sat through the end of the play and afterwards had the usual drink in a nearby cafe, but there was nothing more to say.

My mother is a dreamer and sometimes she just sits and stares, hoping that she will still find a way out, something she can say, some clever way that she can escape even now. She stays in the past for a few minutes and doesn’t hear you sometimes when you speak. She’s still thinking of running away.

Very late one evening, an envelope was dropped in the door. It was addressed to my mother and, when she opened it, she found it was full of money. There was no note going with it to say who it came from, but my mother knew immediately. She also knew that my father would not allow it and the trouble would start again and all the doors in the house would be banging. So she put the envelope away and said nothing. Next day she went straight over to the Miss Ryans to give the money back. She said it was so generous of them, but she could not accept it because that would be the end of the family and the end of Ireland. Then the Miss Ryans both stood at the door and shook their heads.

‘What money?’ they said.

They looked at each other and said there was some kind of mistake. Money in an envelope didn’t automatically mean it came from the Miss Ryans. They don’t go around dropping money into people’s letter boxes before they go upstairs and lie down softly in their beds. My mother asked if it wasn’t the Miss Ryans who dropped the money into her door, then who was it? So the Miss Ryans scratched their heads and thought about it for a moment and said the money probably came from God.

There was no way out but to bring the money back home again and there was nothing my father could do about it. My mother told him the money came from God and you couldn’t give it back, unless he wanted her to put it into the poor box in the church, but he didn’t want that either. There was no slamming doors this time, but he said she was still not allowed to go back home to Germany on her own. He said he had lots of cousins in America and South Africa who couldn’t come home to Ireland any time they liked. So she put the money away and said she would wait until there was enough for all of us to go to Germany together.
Then everything was all right again and everybody in our house was dreaming and saving up money in jars.

My mother helped us to get everything ready for the puppet show. My father said we could use his desk-lamp as a spotlight. Onkel Ted came and Tante Roseleen and Tante Lilly, as well as Eileen Crowley and Kitty from Cork. Tante Eileen came up from Skibbereen with Onkel John this time, because he was attending the Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis and he knew all about politics. Anne was there and so was her brother Harry, and everybody was afraid of him going to the Congo, because the only thing the Irish army was good at was keeping the peace. Lots of the neighbours came, too, like the Miss Ryans and the Miss Doyles. There was a whole table full of sandwiches and cakes. People brought lemonade and there was even wine and whiskey and bottles of black beer.

All the chairs and seats in the house were brought into the
Kinderzimmer
and lined up in rows. My mother helped Maria to tie a box of sweets around her tummy as a belly tray, so she could go around offering them to the audience. Ita was sitting on Harry’s knee trying to comb all his hair forward, and Tante Eileen from Skibbereen was showing everybody how to light a new cigarette from the old one. And when they were all sitting down, my mother closed the big wooden shutters on the window and switched on the spotlight. It was like a real theatre with people coughing in the audience and trying to stop making noise. My mother got in behind the puppet theatre with us and when everybody stopped talking and coughing, Franz pulled the string to open the curtains.

‘Have you seen the dog?’ Kasper said.

Then Ita suddenly started talking back to the puppets, because she believed everything they said and my mother
had to put her head out and tell her to be quiet and not give away the ending. We continued and it was all in German, so nobody could understand what was going on except Onkel Ted and my father. Everybody else was in the wrong country and couldn’t rescue us.

There was a man called Arnulf, like the story my mother heard about in Germany, and he would not let any of the other puppets speak. All the time, Kasper was walking along and meeting other puppets like Hansel and Gretel and the grandmother and the queen and the king and other puppets that we made up ourselves with papier mâché. But none of them could say a word to Kasper, because Arnulf said they were not allowed to speak to him. Kasper asked them where the dog was, but they were all afraid to say anything in case Arnulf would come and punish them. So then Kasper had to find a way of killing Arnulf so that all the other puppets could speak again. And when Arnulf was dead with his head over the side of the theatre, my mother switched on the hairdryer and the blue scarf started blowing across the stage. Then Kasper came to the seafront and found the dog barking at the waves. That was the end and when Franz pulled the curtain closed, the audience clapped for a long time.

It’s a long way to go to Germany. You have to go on two different ships and five different trains. My father shows us the tickets and my mother counts the luggage lined up in the hallway, six suitcases and four children. She laughs and claps her hands because we’re going home and everybody is so excited that you feel nearly sick in your stomach. First you go on the ship to Holyhead. You go across the gangplank and my father laughs at the sign over the door that says ‘Mind your Head’ because it’s like a warning to anyone who leaves Ireland to be careful, not to forget where you come from or do anything stupid. Outside on deck you can see the lighthouse going by and the land moving further and further away until it’s out of sight. Maria wants to know if we’re going to get seasick, because the ship is moving from side to side and you can’t walk straight. The seagulls keep following us even though it’s dark now and there’s nothing more to see except some yellow light from the ship on the water. At night you take the train to London to see the black taxis. And the next morning you take another train and another ship to Holland and three more trains after that until you’re in Kempen and we’re back in my mother’s film.

They were waiting for us at the window. Ta Maria came out and threw her arms around my mother for a long time
without a word. Then it was Tante Lisalotte’s turn and she wouldn’t let go. They stood outside on the street, hugging and looking at each other up and down, again and again, and they just kept saying ‘
ja, ja, ja
’ and ‘
nein, nein, nein
’ as if they didn’t believe their own eyes. The suitcases were forgotten on the ground. They shook hands with my father and called him Hans, as if he was going to be German, too, from now on. They knew all our names, but they kept saying ‘
Ach, Du lieber Himmel
’, as if they thought my mother had only gone away to Ireland for a few days and come back with four children.

Then it was time for coffee and we were sent over to the Kranz Café to get cakes. The smell of baking was like a warm pillow in your face when you walked in the door. All the women in the Kranz Café asked us questions and said we had soft voices, like German children long ago before the war. They said we were the long ago children with good manners and straight backs and no chewing gum. The cake was wrapped in the shape of a church so that the paper didn’t touch the icing on the top. They told us to hold the parcel flat so that it would arrive on the table the way it left the café, and Ta Maria even had the same silver trowel that my mother has, so you could lift a slice on to the plate and make sure it had never been touched by human fingers.

My mother walked around the town with us to look for all the things that had not changed. The church with the red steeple was there, just like it was in the photographs, as well as the cinema with the name Kempener Lichtspiele and the windmill on the Burgring. The shops had everything laid out in the windows just like the day that she left. The only thing that was missing was the house on the Buttermarkt square where she lived when she was small. The
fountain was still there outside, but the house was gone. There were new doors on the houses and new windows. My mother said everyone had new kitchens and new cookers, and that’s what happens when you lose the war and you never want to look back at old things. Everything has to be new. The streets and the people still had the same names in German, but she was sometimes lost and couldn’t find things she remembered.

It was like being six years of age again and maybe she was homesick in her own home town. Or maybe we had been away too long, she said, and we were getting used to living by the sea, because she was expecting to see a bright blue glass of water at the end of every street. And late in the afternoon when we walked so far that we were nearly in the country, there was a high breeze in the trees that sounded like water. At the edge of the town we stood looking at the flat land going out for ever and watched a car travelling all the way across the horizon behind a line of tall trees.

There was lots of talk about making the evening meal and who would be eating what. Did Irish children like
Wurst
? Was there anything we didn’t eat? They had black bread and black jam, and plates made of wood. They kept tidying up even while they were eating because nobody likes the table to be ‘
abgegrasst
’, like a field where the cows have already eaten all the grass. Then there was lots more talk about who would be sleeping where. Everyone was counting heads and spaces in beds. In between, they would sometimes remember a story and laugh so much that they had to lean on something to stop themselves from falling down. ‘
Zu Bett, zu Bett wer ein Liebchen hat, wer keines hat geht auch zu Bett
’ – ‘To Bed, to Bed if you’re in love, to bed if you’re on your own.’ The soap was different, and so
were the basins and the toilets. The pillows were square and there was a big duvet instead of blankets. I was allowed to sleep on the sofa with the curtains moving slowly and the light coming in from the street outside like my mother’s film on the wall, and when I woke up the next morning I found that I was still in Germany with my arm hanging over the side.

It was like being at home because they were always talking about things to be cleaned. There was a smell of washing and the white sheets were hanging out on the line outside so that you could run through them with your eyes closed, like running into the smell of baking in the Kranz Café. Tante Lisalotte kept checking through our things, examining the collars, picking up shirts and asking if they had been worn, as if she wasn’t happy until she found something to wash. And then we had to help with the sheets and everyone picked a corner each and walked in towards the centre like Irish dancing, until they were folded and ironed and counted and put away again.

Tante Lisalotte was the aunt with a cravat-making factory in the house, so we got a coloured cravat each. She was married to Onkel Max and they had two boys called Stefan and Herbert who showed us how to throw water bombs out the window. They had a box of matches and a cigar in the basement, but Tante Lisalotte could smell trouble and came down before they had a chance to light it up. Four boys in lederhosen, she said, like
Max und Moritz
multiplied by two. Tante Minne was a doctor who wanted to collect lots of valuable antiques and Onkel Wilhelm was an optician who had hundreds of guns and antlers covering all the walls of the house. He was the uncle who kept a bottle of schnapps hidden in the aquarium of his surgery, behind artificial plants and the two lazy carp swimming
back and forth. They had two children called Mathias and Ursula who also wore lederhosen and taught us new words in German. Ursula had blonde plaits, too, and knew how to whistle with two fingers in her mouth.

All our aunts in Germany had the same nose, so they could sniff what was going on anywhere, even things that had not happened yet. My mother said it was a gift that the Kaiser girls inherited down through the generations and that maybe all the Germans had. They could sniff every warning signal, every danger and every possible misfortune. My mother could sniff a lie from a million miles away and Tante Lisalotte could sniff trouble around the corner. Tante Minne could look at you for a long time and sniff what was inside your head. They knew if you had brushed your teeth or whether you had washed your hands. They knew if you had said your prayers or not. They could walk into a room and tell what you were talking about. They could sniff where you had been and they knew if you were wasting your money on chewing gum. The Irish aunts and uncles gave you money but the German aunts never gave you money, only clothes and toys. The German aunts and uncles told you not to spend any money, even the money that the Irish aunts and uncles gave you.

My father was different in Germany. He wore a cravat and a new suit, and he also got a new pair of glasses from Onkel Wilhelm that had a brown tint and made him look more German. He stopped wearing his tweed cap and his face was brown from the sun, right down to the collar of his shirt. He smiled a lot and one day Maria even made him eat chewing gum, just to try it. He liked talking to people about technical things, about all the new inventions in Germany. He had lots of new friends, like Onkel Willi, the priest who drove too fast with a cigar in his mouth and
played chess with a box of cigars on the table beside him. I watched them one afternoon playing quietly until the room filled up with smoke and my father won and they shook hands like friends for life.

My father drank beer and sometimes he was nearly as German as any of the uncles, telling stories and laughing. With his brown face and his new cravat he looked so German that I thought he was going to buy a car and start smoking cigars as well. We didn’t need to be Irish and there was no point in speaking Irish to people on buses in Germany. Tante Minne knew that Ireland was full of monastic ruins and valuable antiques, and Onkel Wilhelm knew it was full of rivers with salmon and trout. Onkel Max said it was a small country with lots of big writers. Onkel Willi knew it was full of priests and sheep and holy shrines along the road, and Tante Lisalotte knew it was full of rainbows and lots of trees bent over by the wind. They said Irish people were very friendly and very generous, but my father said that was because they didn’t know how to own anything or keep money in their pockets. The poorer you were the more generous you were, he said. Irish people were so afraid of being poor that they spent all their money, while German people were so afraid of being poor that they saved up every penny.

My father said Irish people lived like there was no tomorrow and Onkel Wilhelm said the Germans lived like there was no yesterday. Onkel Max said that’s why Germans were busy trying to invent lots of new things like cars and tinted glasses and the Irish were busy inventing stories and literature instead. My father said the Irish invented lots of other things, too, like the hunger strike and Irish coffee. Tante Minne said it was a pity nobody in Germany thought of going on hunger strike against the
Nazis. Onkel Wilhelm said it was a pity the Germans weren’t more like the Irish and my father said it was a pity the Irish weren’t more like the Germans. He said it was a pity that Ireland wasn’t closer to Germany and Onkel Max said it was a pity that Germany wasn’t surrounded by water. My mother said Ireland was a place where you still needed luck and prayers, and Ta Maria said Germany was a place where you made your own luck and deserved everything you got. They all agreed that the Irish never hurt anybody. They said the Germans tried to drive everybody who wasn’t German into extinction, unlike the Irish who were nearly driven into extinction themselves. Would you rather kill or be killed, my father asked, and nobody knew how to answer that question. Would you rather trample or be trampled, he said, because one language always goes into extinction in the end and nobody knew how to answer that either. Instead they agreed that Ireland and Germany were both still divided countries. The only difference was that the Irish won the war and still hated the British, while the Germans lost the war and had nothing against the British. And then there was an argument because Tante Minne wanted Mathias and Ursula to practise speaking English to us, but my father said that wasn’t allowed. So Tante Minne said my father was a welcome guest but he couldn’t start making rules in her house.

‘If you hate the British so much,’ Tante Minne said, ‘then why don’t you teach your children the most perfect English.’

My mother didn’t know how to fight back like that any more, even though she was in her own country. She had other ways of going around trouble. And anyway it was soon forgotten because it was time to start visiting more people and travelling around Germany. We took the train
to Neuss to visit a bishop who had a large bowl of fruit on the table and a painting of a fruit bowl on the wall. He asked me if I preferred the real fruit or the painting of fruit, so I pointed at the bowl on the table and his housekeeper packed it all up in bags for us. He gave me his name too, Hugo. Then his driver drove us all the way to Cologne on the autobahn that went straight for ever. You could trust that there would be no cows chewing on the road and no ‘
Reifenbeisser
’ dogs running out to try and bite the tyres. We saw the Cologne Cathedral and the railway station and the bridge that once fell into the river during the war and the big number 4711 lighting up at night.

Then we all had to split up. My mother took Maria and Ita on the train to see Tante Elfriede in Rüsselsheim and, after that, all the way up to Salzburg to see Tante Marianne and to meet all the writers and artists who came to visit there. My father took Franz and me to see the Drachenfelz and he was happier than he had ever been in his life before because it was like being on his honeymoon. We sat on a boat going down the Rhine and he talked a lot, much more than ever before, pointing at the mountains and telling us about how he met my mother. He wanted to explain everything and we had to listen. We drank lemonade called Miranda and had our dinner on the boat, watching other boats passing along beside us, some of them flat with lots of coal heaped up on them. The river was so wide it was like an autobahn with boats going up on one side and down the other.

It was evening by the time we got off the boat and started climbing up the Drachenfelz. We went up the steps and then walked along the path. My father was limping and it wasn’t long before we slowed down, because it was very steep. We stopped to take a rest and turned around to look
at the river below us with the ships still going up and down slowly without a sound, almost like toy boats. After a while, we continued back up the hill again but we were hardly moving at all. My father took off his cravat and put it in his pocket. He opened his shirt and you could see his white neck inside. He took off his jacket and carried it on his arm instead. But then he stopped to ask us if we still wanted to go all the way to the top. I knew how much he wanted to see the hotel again where he stayed with my mother. I knew it was a place you could not talk about, only see with your own eyes. He wanted to go back and see if it was still the same. And maybe then he was afraid to go back and find that it was not the same.