The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton
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with the answer. He said if Áine was to stop burning holes in her arms and legs, if she was ever to smile again and stop being sad, then she would have to get her baby back. So one day my mother and Áine went out and they came back with a new baby. She was going back home again because she was happy now. She didn’t need to smoke cigarettes and talk to herself any more because she had the baby to talk to. My mother helped her to pack her suitcase with lots of German baby clothes and they laughed because Áine said it was nearly like a German baby going home to Connemara. And the day she was leaving, it was my mother who was crying because Áine was smiling.
Men came to fix the boiler. There was some more brown tea with milk on the floor of the kitchen, but then it was all over and the pipes started heating up again. My father put lots of coal into the boiler so the house got warm. Then there was a delivery of coal. A truck stopped on the street outside and because they couldn’t go around the back, the men with black faces and black hands had to come through the house. My mother was afraid the wind would slam the doors shut in anger, so we had to hold them open, Franz at the front door, me at the in-between door, and Maria at the back door. She told us to count the bags as they came in. In Ireland people count in their heads, she said, but in Germany people count out loud. Out loud we counted – Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Fünf … all the way up to fifteen. The men walked in stooped over with the heavy sacks, leaving long black marks where the sacks scraped against the wall on their way through. And where they went down the three steps towards the kitchen and out the back door, they put a black hand up every time to hold on to the door frame. One of the men winked and made me forget what number I was on. I didn’t know if I should be counting the sack that was coming or the sack gone by. But then I heard Franz counting the next number at the front door and I was able to catch up.
When the shed outside was full and the coal was spilling out across the path, the men got back into the truck. One of them counted the empty sacks as if he could not trust us to count right. He came back inside with a pink piece of paper covered with black fingerprints and asked my mother to sign her name. That was to make sure she agreed that there was no mistake in the counting and that nobody ran away with one of the empty sacks. But there could be no mistake because we counted out loud in German and the man counted the empty sacks in English, and it was the same number no matter what language.
My mother has to go home to Kempen and we can’t go with her. She’s on the phone in the front room crying and speaking in a loud voice to Germany and we’re outside the door listening until she comes out with shadows around her eyes. She says she has to go away for a while. So then we have to stay in the house with the yellow door where they speak no Irish and no German, only English. My mother lays everything out on the bed for us and packs it into a bag. We get up very early in the morning when it’s still dark outside and the light in the bedroom is so bright that you can’t look at it. It’s cold, too, and Franz is standing on the bed in his underpants, shivering and singing a long note with his teeth clacking. I’m able to put my shirt on by myself but I can’t do the buttons because my fingers are soft. My mother is in a hurry and she pinched my neck when she was doing up the top button, but she said sorry and then it’s time to go. It’s still dark outside on the street and you can blow your breath out like smoke. It’s still dark when we get on the bus and still dark when we come up to the yellow door and then I can’t walk because my legs are soft. I have a limp in both legs and I hold on to my mother’s coat because I don’t want to emigrate and live in a different country from her.
I don’t know where Germany is. I know it’s far away from Ireland because you can’t go there on the bus, you can only look at it on the map. I know there was the First World War and the Second World War and the second would not have happened without the first. I know the Germans wanted to have an empire and that wasn’t allowed. The goat wanted to have a long tail but only got a short one, my mother says, whenever we want something that we can’t have.
I don’t like the house with the yellow door. I don’t like the room with the toilet and ten potties hanging on the wall. I don’t like the smell of the brown rubber sheet on the bed and I don’t like the smell of custard. The house with the yellow door and the yellow custard is a place where you wait for your mother to come back and sometimes you hear other children crying on the stairs because they’re waiting too. Franz would not eat the custard or go to the toilet. He closed his mouth and said he would never open it again for the rest of his life. The nurse tried to pretend that the spoon was a train going into his mouth, but he shook his head and turned away. He could only eat and go to the toilet in German. So my father had to come and bring him to the toilet. I closed my mouth and refused to speak because the nurse would not say goodbye to the moon. I said she was from a different country and then my father had to come another time and give the nurse the word for moon in Irish.
I know that my mother’s father, Franz Kaiser, owned a stationery shop in the town of Kempen and nobody had any money to buy anything, so he had to close it down. But that didn’t stop him making jokes and playing tricks on people just to see the look on their faces. My mother says he was famous for all the funny things he did because he always made up for it afterwards. One day in the Kranz Cafe he stuck his finger into a doughnut and held it up in the air to ask how much it cost, just to see the look on their faces when he said it was too expensive. But then he bought all of them, one each for my mother and her four sisters and one each for all the other children he could find on the market square.
One day he played a trick on the commanding officer of the Belgian army. I know that my mother’s town was in the Rhineland but that was occupied by the Belgians and the French as punishment for the First World War. It was confiscated from the Germans by the Treaty of Versailles. So one night Franz Kaiser and his cousin Fritz planned a new trick. They filled a porcelain potty full of ink from the shop. They spread out a sheet of paper on the table and took down the big quill from over the door outside the shop. Then they invited the commanding officer of the Belgian army to come to the house for a drink, just to see the look on his face when they brought him over to the table and asked him to sign a new treaty. The officer was very angry, but then they gave him a cigar and the best wine in the house. My mother says everybody liked Franz Kaiser’s jokes, even the people who were joked about, and maybe the Second World War would not have happened if there were more people like him. Then the Nazis took over and there was no more time for joking in Germany.
Then he was ill and my mother had to tell him what was happening outside on the square. He sat up in a bed in the living room upstairs over the shop, with the big alcove and the piano at the window. She had to look out and tell him who was going by. And every day, her mother played for him to make him better. She sang the Freischutz and all the Schubert songs she had performed at the opera house in Krefeld, when he sent her a bouquet of bananas instead of flowers. Every day, she shaved his face and played the piano, but he didn’t get better. My mother was nine years old and one day he asked her to bring him a mirror so he could say goodbye to himself. He didn’t want to know who was passing by the house any more. All he did was look into the mirror for a long time in silence. Then he smiled at himself and said: ‘Tschüss, Franz …’
My mother says she will never forget the smell of flowers all around his bed and she will never forget the people of the town all standing outside on the market square. She remembers the shadows around her mother’s eyes when the coffin came out of the house. She says that maybe it’s not such a good thing to be the child of two people who loved each other so much, because it’s like being in a novel or a song or a big film that you might never get out of.
After that her mother was always dressed in black. Every evening she gathered all the five girls together in the living room over the shop. Marianne, Elfriede, Irmgard, Lisalotte and Minne all listening to Schubert songs and looking out at the people crossing the Buttermarkt square to go to the cinema. My mother says she can remember the soft, sad rain that blurred the sign above the cinema saying ‘Kempener Lichtspiele’ and made the tree trunks black. There was no money left in Germany, so her mother then had to teach the piano and put a candle in the fire to make the house look warm. They had to sell things like candlesticks and