The Sailor in the Wardrobe. Hugo Hamilton
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not just the book but one of her most precious memories as well.
‘Stefan is coming over to visit us,’ she said. ‘We better get ready.’
Stefan is the son of my mother’s school friend, Tante Käthe. I remember going to stay with them in Mainz when we were small. I remember Onkel Ulrich and Tante Käthe’s chemist shops in the city. Onkel Ulrich has a straight leg from the time that he was injured in the war. I saw him at Mass, keeping his right leg straight out and nobody making much of a fuss about it except us. I remember trying it out for myself for days, imagining what it would be like to be shot and not being able to bend one knee as long as you live. And Stefan. I remember Stefan because he was a good bit older than me and he didn’t really want to have much to do with us or let us play with his toys. And now he was grown up and coming over to Ireland to collect the book which they had given to my mother as a gift. Maria told my mother she should hide it in the attic. Ita said it was against the law to take back a gift. My mother put her arms around them and said she would never give the book back, no more than she would ever give away one of her own children.
That night I could hear her downstairs discussing it all with my father and him saying they had no moral right to demand back a gift that was given in good faith. Even when we were all in bed and the whole house was silent, everybody was still thinking about the book and where it should be hidden. I was thinking about Germany after the war and all the bombed-out cities. I thought of Stefan coming over and taking away the book from my mother and her crying because the last bit of Germany was going to be gone now. I thought about the lobster underwater, helplessly crawling through the seaweed with black rubber bands tied around their claws. I thought about how I betrayed my mother and how the lobster were making their way back out along the seabed, lost and defenceless, unable to open up their claws.
It started long before that, one year around Halloween when we tried to make friends with everybody. Myself and my brother Franz wanted to stop being outsiders, on our own all the time. We wanted to be insiders from now on, like everyone else in Ireland, so we decided to try and find some way of getting in with them. I started practising English on my own, saying things to the wall like ‘What are you lookin’ at?’ I rehearsed conversations out loud in my room, threatening to kick the shit out of the wardrobe and telling the door to watch out or else I would go over and straighten his face for him. I even practised the walk that they had around our place that my mother calls the ‘Glasthule Swagger’. I stopped to glance sideways at myself in the mirror before going out. I was the hard man of the house and I felt as real as anyone else out there.
They were collecting wood for weeks. I watched them after school carrying pallets and broken planks through the streets, all working together. Some of them had supermarket trolleys stacked up with junk from building sites, sheets of timber with rusty nails sticking out, anything that would burn. It’s the same every year. They keep it all hidden until the night of Halloween. Everybody knows where the bonfire is going to be, in the park with the railings, with the red-bricked national school on one side and the terraces of red-bricked corporation houses on the other. Every year, they say it’s going to be bigger than ever before. And every year, by the time the flames reach the height of the houses and the sparks begin to drift across the roofs, somebody calls the fire brigade and there’s trouble.
We wanted to be part of the big fire, so we found a wooden door in the laneway and decided to carry it down on the afternoon of Halloween. The blue paint was peeling off and it was submerged in weeds, but we kicked away the nettles and carried it down the street with the snails and worms still clinging on to one side. It was so heavy that we had to put it down every now and again along the way. Franz had the idea that we should roll it down on an old axle and wheels that we had from an old pram, but we were already halfway and just carried on. By the time we got there, they had begun to pile up the wood for the fire, so we brought it straight in through the gates of the park. We didn’t talk or say anything. We thought it was a good time for a truce, with everybody on the same side, so we placed our door standing up along with all their wood.
‘Look, it’s the Nazis,’ one of them said.
I was afraid they would tell us to fuck off and take away our door. But they needed every piece of wood they could get. They didn’t care if it was Nazi wood.
‘It’s a German door,’ they said. ‘It’ll burn like fuck.’
It felt strange to be helping the people who have always been against us, as if we were betraying ourselves. But it felt good at the same time because we were all going to be friends now for the sake of the fire. My mother says you have to be careful because they are the fist people and they never change. I knew they still wanted to put us on trial for being German. They still wanted to execute us, but maybe the night of the bonfire was the big moment where we could all forget history, I thought. Maybe they would overlook all that and allow us to take part.
We stood back to watch. There were two of them standing on top, pulling a broken bedside locker up on a rope. Everybody shouting and helping, passing in planks of wood through the railings and throwing car tyres around the base. A small boy brought a pile of ice-pop sticks. As it started getting dark, nobody paid much attention to us any more and we looked as Irish as everyone else.
At dinner, my mother helped us to escape. She doesn’t like fire. She’s afraid of things burning and the smell of smoke reminds her of the war, but she explained to my father that we had to be there because our contribution was made and we had to see our door in flames. It was fully dark outside now and I could hear bangers going off. My father looked angry, but I knew he was happy underneath because Halloween was an ancient Irish invention which they had in West Cork as well and the word bonfire in English came from the Irish words ‘Tinte Cnáimh’, the fires of bones. The day of the dead. As long as we didn’t speak English or take any of his wood, he said he had nothing against us going, so we ran down to see them starting the fire. I even had three bangers which I bought in the city from a woman on Moore Street who kept them under her apron. We let them off and our bangs were adding to all the other noise of rockets lighting up the sky around us.
There were children everywhere going around with masks and plastic bags full of treats. We used to do that as well, but everybody knew who we were underneath, because my mother always made the masks herself and they looked like German wolves and German monsters. The streets were full of gangs of children dressed up as Frankenstein. Sometimes there were three Draculas in one group, all looking the same but in different heights and ages. There were older people as well, on their way to a Halloween party somewhere. A girl dressed as an angel, in a miniskirt and high, black shiny boots and wings on her back, accompanied by a doctor in a white coat swinging a stethoscope around in his hand and chasing children away who were asking for cigarettes. There was fog and smoke everywhere, even before they started the fire the air was heavy and damp, like cold steam.
At the park, they were all gathering to watch one of the older boys on top of the wooden structure with a canister, pouring petrol over the top. Another boy poured petrol all around the sides. Finally, a cheer echoed around the terraces and the yellow light of the flames was reflected on the walls and in the windows and in the faces all around the fire. Even the railings turned gold.
It didn’t take long for the sparks to crack. There was shouting and somebody called it an inferno. They were shielding their eyes from the flames with their elbows. Others were drinking beer and smoking as they threw bits of lighting wood that had fallen out, back in again. Our blue door was in flames now and it looked as if you could open it and walk straight into the interior of the fire. It was the door to hell. My brother Franz and I stood watching like everyone else. We were the inferno-brothers. We had dark eyes and yellow faces, as if we had just come back out from inside the fire and shut the flaming door behind us.
And then we could hear the fire-brigade siren in the distance. The sparks were being carried across the roof of the school and we knew what was coming. As soon as the blue light of the fire brigade began to flash around the terraces, Franz moved back.
‘I’m