The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton
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thinks about it as though it just happened yesterday, as though the film is never over and she’ll never escape. Maybe the reason why people are good at stories is that they sometimes have things they can’t tell, things they must keep secret at all costs and make up for in other ways. So she tells us the story of the pilgrimage instead. She tells us how Ireland was a place where you could trust everyone, where people prayed every day, where you could go and say the rosary and make up for all the things that happened in the war.
It was a great way for a film to come to an end, cycling along the small roads with the sun slanting through the clouds like in holy pictures, lighting up the mountains like a stage in the opera house. It was flickering through the stone walls. Everywhere these stone walls and everywhere the grass combed in one direction by the wind. Trees bent like old men and everywhere so empty except for the haystacks in the fields and the monastic ruins. Once or twice along the way there were cows on the road that made her stop completely. Big cow faces looking at her, as if they were amazed to see a German woman in Ireland after the war.
Then it started raining and getting dark and she had to find a place to stay quickly. It was raining so much that the water was jumping away from her eyes when she blinked and her shoulders were shivering. She got off the bicycle because it was impossible to go any further. A man pointed to a house that didn’t even look like a guest house, but it was better to stay there because you couldn’t see a thing any more. There was a light on inside and the woman of the house came to the door with lots of children behind her. One girl had her dress in her mouth, all of them staring as if my mother had come in with the rain.
‘It’s not often we see a German woman cycling around these parts on her own,’ the woman said.
My mother says you can’t be sure in Ireland if people say things with admiration or not. Irish people are good at saying things in between admiration and accusation, between envy and disdain. She says the woman looked her up and down as if she liked German clothes but didn’t completely trust her.
‘I have come from Lough Derg,’ my mother explained.
That made everything right. She was a pilgrim. A pilgrim coming to Ireland to pray for all the bad things that happened in Europe.
In the kitchen, they made her sit and eat a meal while they all watched and the man of the house kept asking questions about Germany. Was it in ruins like they said in the papers? She had to describe the cities after the war – Nuremberg, Hamburg, Dresden. The woman of the house kept saying ‘You’re not serious’, but people in Germany wouldn’t make up something like that. The children kept staring. They were so shy that they were afraid to move closer to her. It was like being a film actress. They spoke about her as if she was still in a film. She’ll have some more bread, the man of the house said. She’ll be needing a glass of whiskey, he said after she was finished eating, as if they had to celebrate the guest who came in with the rain.
The man of the house raised his glass with all the children looking up.
‘Heil Hitler,’ he said.
There was a big smile on his face, my mother says, and she didn’t know what to say. Of course, he was only being friendly. It was part of the Irish welcome.
‘Fair play to the Germans,’ he said.
He said the Germans were great people altogether. He kept saying it was a pity they lost because they were a mighty nation. He winked at her with admiration, then left a long silence, waiting to see how she would respond.
‘Fair play to the Germans, for the almighty thrashing you gave the British. Fair play to Hitler for that, at least.’
He was only being hospitable, my mother says, to make her feel at home. She could not argue with him. She was trapped inside German history and couldn’t get out of it. Instead she smiled and said it had been a long journey back from Lough Derg. She thanked them for such a lovely welcome, but said she could no longer keep her eyes open.
She was given a room with a small fire going. Her clothes were still steaming. There was a smell of cabbage and damp walls. The bed sank down in the middle, but she was so tired that nothing mattered any more and it didn’t take long to fall asleep to the sound of the rain. She heard the voices of children on the far side of the wall and sometimes the man of the house, too, speaking in a deep voice. But the rain was whispering and bouncing into an enamel basin outside and rushing away into a drain like the sound of the rosary being said all night.
Sometime later she woke up and saw the woman of the house standing beside the bed, holding a lamp, gently shaking her arm. The woman explained that there was an emergency. Would she mind giving up the bed and spending the night in another room? There were three men soaked to the skin outside on the doorstep needing accommodation for the night.
‘I can’t turn them away,’ the woman said. ‘Poor creatures.’
My mother says she had to get up and take her things to the family room where the woman pointed to the marriage bed. The children were all fast asleep in another bed. And the room was in such a mess, with clothes and newspapers on the floor, bits of food, too, even a harness for a horse and a hay-fork and wellington boots. She stood there looking around as if she couldn’t believe her eyes.
‘It’s only topsy dirty,’ the woman said.
‘But where is your husband?’
‘You have nothing to be afraid of, love. He’ll stay by the fire.’
My mother says you can’t complain if you’re a pilgrim escaping from Germany. She says you have to offer things up. For people who are less fortunate and for all the awful things that happened. So she just got into bed with the woman of the house. She felt the warmth left behind by the man of the house. She could hear the whole room breathing, until the woman started speaking in the dark. She listened to the woman talking for a while, and then she began to talk as well, as if there were things that could only be said in the dark.
She says she never saw the men. She heard them coming in and muttering for a while to each other in the room. She never saw the man of the house again either, but she heard him in the kitchen, tapping his pipe against the fireplace. She heard the children dreaming sometimes and the cows elbowing each other in the barn outside. She smelled the rain and heard it drumming on the roof, like somebody still saying the rosary. They whispered so as not to wake up the children. They talked for a long time as if they were sisters.
On the front door of our house there is the number two. I know how to say this number in German: Zwei. My mother teaches us how to count up the stairs: Eins, Zwei, Drei … And when you get to ten you can start again, so many steps all the way up that you can call them any number you like. And when we’re in our pyjamas, we say goodnight birds and goodnight trees, until my mother counts again very quickly and we jump into bed as fast as possible: Eins, Zwei, Drei.
There are workers in the house and they know how to smoke. They made a mountain in the back garden and sit on it, drinking tea and eating sandwiches. They smoke cigarettes and mix sand and cement with a shovel. They whistle and make a hole in the middle where they pour in the water to make a lake, and sometimes the water from the lake spills over the side before the shovel can catch it. We do the same with spoons. The workers have different words, not the same as my mother, and they teach us how to count in English: one, two, three … But my father says that’s not allowed. He says he’ll speak to them later.
One day there was a fox in the kitchen, just like the fox in the story book. The workers were gone, so my mother closed the door and called the police. Then a Garda came to our house and went into the kitchen on his own and started banging. There was a smell of smoke and we waited on the stairs for a long time, until the Garda came out again with the fox lying dead on a shovel with his tail hanging down and blood around his mouth and nose.
‘You’ll have no more strangers in your house, please God,’ he said.
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