The Speckled People (8 page)

‘I’m good again,’ I said.

‘You mean you’re better,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m better,’ I said. ‘I’m too better.’

‘Of course you are, love,’ she said. But still she could not let me go until the doctors said so. Everybody was gone and the hospital was quiet. All lights were switched off except for the small one at the door. The nurse was tidying up all around me and not saying very much. Her white shoes were making tiny squeaks on the floor.

‘I’m not a Nazi,’ I said.

Then she looked up and smiled.

‘I’m not German,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘I know that, love. I believe you.’

It should be easier to sell a crucifix in Ireland. My mother closes the front door and stands in the hall with her coat still on, looking up at the picture of the Virgin Mary. She throws her arms up in the air and says she can’t understand it. She has been to every church and every convent and every hospital in Dublin. We went with her on the bus one day and a priest gave us a sweet each, a satin cushion. He smiled and nearly said yes to the cross, but then he shook his head at the last minute. Beautiful hand-carved oak crosses from Oberammergau and nobody wants them, my mother says. It’s hard to believe, when you think of everyone in Ireland praying twice a day at least and all they still have to pray for.

‘Surely somebody needs a crucifix,’ she says.

That’s the whole idea of my father starting a business, to sell something the Irish people really need, something you believe in yourself. We believe in crosses, so we kneel down every night and pray that we will have God on our side as a partner in business. But in the end, nobody wants them and my mother sits down in the kitchen without even taking her coat off, shaking her head from side to side and breathing out slowly as if she wants to be the best at not breathing in again until you have to. Maybe they’re too expensive, she says. Maybe it’s too late and there are
too many crosses in Ireland already. Or maybe they’re the wrong kind of crosses and Irish people only like the ones where Jesus has blood on his hands and feet and there’s a gash in his side and a scroll at the top saying INRI.

She doesn’t understand Ireland sometimes, because they like strange things like pink cakes and soft ice cream and salt and vinegar. They spend all their money on First Holy Communion outfits. They don’t like serving people and they don’t like being in a queue either, because when the bus comes, they forget about the rules and just rush for the door. The bus drivers in Ireland are blind and the shopkeepers don’t want to sell things to you. The butcher has a cigarette in his mouth while he’s cutting the meat, and nobody knows how to say the word no. In Ireland, they nod when they mean no, and shake their heads when they’re agreeing with you. She says it’s like in the films, when somebody looks up with a worried face and says one thing, it means that the opposite is going to happen. When somebody says nobody is going to come out alive and that they’re all going to die, then at the last minute somebody comes along to the rescue. And when everybody at the bus stop begins to say that the buses have stopped running, along comes the bus at last and they all rush forward to get on.

Sometimes Irish people don’t understand my mother either. When she’s trying to be helpful, they think she’s interfering and being nosy. When she tries to warn some of the other mothers about their children eating too many sweets or crossing the road without looking, they say they don’t want some German woman telling their kids what to do. One day, there was a woman outside the shop with a brand new pram with big wheels. It had the word Pedigree written on the side and the woman was very proud of it,
because it was like a new car. My mother admired the new pram, but she warned her to be careful it didn’t fall over with the baby inside. So then the woman called her a Nazi and told her to mind her own business.

Nobody knows what my mother is trying to say sometimes. And nobody has any idea where Oberammergau is either. She tells them it’s a place in Bavaria, where they have the crucifixion every ten years, a bit like going up to Croagh Patrick. They nod and say yes and look very interested, so why don’t they buy hand-carved oak crosses with no blood, just nails and the rest left up to your imagination?

‘It’s the shoes,’ she says at last.

Nobody will buy anything if you don’t look half-decent. You can tell a person’s character by their hands and their shoes, she says, because that’s what Ta Maria always said. Even though Onkel Gerd always said the opposite, that it’s only what’s inside your head that makes you either a scoundrel or a saint. But when you’re trying to sell something, my mother says, it doesn’t matter if you’re a scoundrel or a saint, because what you’re wearing is all they look at. You have to be honest, she says, but you can’t let people know that the wallpaper is hanging off the walls at home.

Then we head off into the city so she can get a pair of decent shoes. I swing around the bus stop and climb up as far as I can until the bus comes. We fight over the window seat, and over who gets the ticket, until my mother says that’s enough, it’s not important to win. Everybody on the bus turns around to look at us because we’re German again. Then we have to behave and sit quietly and bless ourselves whenever we pass by a church, to prove that the Germans are decent people and we did nothing wrong. I pretend to be Irish and
look at the IMCO building passing by like a white ship.

My father says the Irish people can’t live on their imagination for ever. They need money in their pockets now. It’s time to work hard so we can be free and so that nobody will ever starve or be poor again like all the people in west Cork were. He doesn’t want the song about emigration to go on for ever, so it’s time to speak Irish and make Ireland a better place to live. He tells us how his mother Mary Frances spent all her money on putting him through university in Dublin while she fasted and hardly had anything to live on herself. He tells us exactly how much he had to spend each week on food and lodgings, and how he had two pennies left over, one for the Mass on Sunday and one for a razor blade. He sent his washing home by post and cycled all the way home to Leap at Christmas because he could not afford the train or the bus. He had no way of borrowing from a bank, and if it wasn’t for the Jesuits who lent him the money for the final year, we wouldn’t be here now but in America or Canada maybe. He paid back the money as fast as possible when he got his first job as an engineer in Dublin, making matches with Maguire and Patterson.

Even when my father started sending money home, Mary Frances was not able to spend it on herself, because Irish people didn’t know how to do that yet. All she wanted in her life was to make sure that her two sons were educated, one an engineer and the other a Jesuit. And that was the happiest day of her life, when my father came home to Leap with initials after his name. Better than that, the Jesuits even allowed Onkel Ted to go home for a day to see her for the first time in seven years. So she sat looking at her two sons together in the kitchen for a few hours at least, until
Onkel Ted had to leave again very early in the morning to get back to the seminary in the Bog of Allen.

His father died in Cork and the navy refused to give them a pension at first. His mother spent all she had on getting the body home for burial in the mountain graveyard above Glandore. After that she could no longer pay the rent and the landlord wanted her out of the house. A letter went to the local police station telling them to ‘proceed with eviction forthwith’, so she walked up to the church and told the priest she was going to bed. She was not a political person, and some people didn’t mind all too much one way or another who was in the government, because it didn’t make a bit of difference to them. Some people in Ireland had no time for guns either, only education. But everybody hated landlords. So she took her two boys upstairs and got into bed. If they were going to evict her, she said, they would have to drag them out of the bed.

It was not the first time something like that happened in Ireland either. Her uncle was put out of his home and the cottage burned down because he refused to pay rent to the landlord any more. He had nowhere to go after that and if it wasn’t for the local people who built him a tiny cottage to stay in, he would have become a traveller with no place to settle any more, like all the the people on the move after the famine. We would have been travellers, too, moving around from one place to another all our lives and knocking on doors to sell carpets, my father says, so that’s why he gives them money when they come to the door and say ‘God Bless.’ In the end, her uncle went to America. But before he left Ireland he made one great speech for the Land League on a platform in Skibbereen. He stood up and said it was time to wipe landlords off the face of this earth. Then he swung his right arm over the crowd and knocked
the hat off the priest sitting down behind him as he was doing it, so that everyone laughed about that story, long after he was gone. There were lots of people put out of their homes, my father says, until Michael Collins stood up for them and started the resistance.

Sometimes my mother goes over to the neighbours for coffee mornings. Mrs Corcoran invites all her friends around for sandwiches and cakes and gossip. They think my mother is very posh and unfriendly, because she has no gossip and speaks in a German accent all the time. My mother says Mrs Corcoran has a funny accent, too, because she and her friends all speak English like no other Irish people. My father says it’s the famine. Even the people with money to burn and accents that hurt your mouth are still afraid of the famine. They speak like that because they’re afraid of the Irish language coming back and killing everybody in the country this time. He says Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don’t want to speak Irish, because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields. That’s why they speak posh English and pretend that nothing ever happened. My father talks about people dying on coffin ships going to America and my mother talks about people dying on trains going to Poland. My father talks of evictions in Leap and my mother talks of evictions in Kempen. My father says our people died in the famine and my mother says those who died under the Nazis are our people, too. Everybody has things they can’t forget.

My mother likes Irish people, but she doesn’t want to go to any more coffee mornings. They talk about going on holidays all the time and about new things like cars and washing machines. Mrs Corcoran talks about where she has been in the summer and shows the souvenirs she brought
back, like the black bull from Spain and a big bowl with zigzags from Greece. This time, my mother says, she was in South Africa and brought back lots of wood carvings. But that’s not all she brought back either, because right in the middle of the coffee morning, Mrs Corcoran started saying that black people would never be the same as white people. They would never catch up no matter how much education they got.

In the shoe shop, we sit in a line and get a liquorice shoelace each while my mother tries on shoes for a long time. She taps the heels together to hear what they sound like. She says it’s as hard to buy shoes in Ireland as it is to sell a crucifix. Sometimes you have to beg people to sell you something. At first the assistant smiled and said every pair of shoes looked gorgeous. She thought people from Germany had to try on every pair in the shop before they could make up their mind. My mother started imagining shoes that didn’t even exist, shoes from Italy, great shoes she had seen in the past sometime. My mother and the assistant didn’t understand each other. In the end, she went for the dark blue pair that matched her blue dress with the white squiggles, the shoes that made her feet look smallest of all. She walked up along the floor one last time, turned in front of the mirror, then came back and paid.

Now my mother can sell anything. Franz carried the box with the new shoes and we walked across O’Connell Street holding hands in a chain. When you look up at Nelson’s Pillar you sometimes think the white clouds are standing still and the city is moving, running fast out to the sea. If you close your eyes you can hear the sound of footsteps and buses and cars all around you. Seagulls, too. There were seagulls on the roof of the GPO and seagulls standing on the shoulders of Daniel O’Connell.

My father took a half-day and came to meet us in the restaurant. He looked at the new shoes and said they were beautiful. He said it was a great day for us because we would soon be in business, making a profit. There was a big smile on his face. He has lots of straight teeth and when he starts talking, he sometimes sounds like he’s making a speech. He starts blinking and speaking fast, as if he’ll never catch up with all the things he wants to say. My mother says there are lots of men who like to turn things into a joke and make people laugh. She says it’s good to laugh, but my father has a different way of doing things. He can laugh too, until the tears come into his eyes. But then he’s always serious again afterwards, because he is a man with ideas. A man, my mother says, who could never live for himself, only for his children and his country. That’s why he frowns, even when he’s not angry, because he’s in a hurry to do all the things that are still left unfinished in Ireland.

My mother said we could have a cake each, but not one of the pink ones because they’re too sweet and leave nothing to the imagination. My father didn’t want a cake because they were nothing like hers. He said people would fight each other over my mother’s cakes, and anything else that she put her hands to. Then he took her hands and held them up in the air for everyone in the restaurant to see. My mother smiled and got embarrassed. It looked like he was going to stand up and make a speech to the whole restaurant about her. My mother says you can sometimes be overcome by the smell of coffee. His eyes were soft. He said they were precious hands. He said it didn’t matter that we were left with hand-carved wooden crosses from Oberammergau all over the house, because there were plenty of new ideas. He mentioned other things that the Irish people needed very badly. Like umbrellas. And Christmas-tree stands.
And German toys. We would sell things that were so well made and so beautiful that people would fight each other to buy them.

Afterwards my father bought hurling sticks, but said he would take them off us again if we used them as swords for fighting. It was dark by the time we went home and my father showed us the glass of whiskey that kept filling up again and again on the side of the building. There was a packet of cigarettes too that kept disappearing and lighting up again slowly, bit by bit. The seagulls were not there any more, but there were men shouting the names of newspapers on the street like seagulls. Herald-a-Press. Herald-a-Press. On the train, everybody was looking at us because we were the Germans with the hurling sticks. My mother told us the story about Rumpelstiltskin, who gave away his secret in the forest when he thought nobody was listening. Everybody on the train was listening to her. They all surrendered to the story, even though it was in German. One man was already asleep and Maria was trying hard to keep her eyes open. At the end of the story my mother always says the same thing: ’and if he isn’t dead yet, then he must be still alive’. So I think about that for a while and look out at the lights of the city, moving along and blinking.