A Book of Death and Fish (15 page)

I heard this story through the olaid but indirectly. When I got back home, there was still six months to go before I rejoined the History Honours course at Aberdeen. It might have been panic, wondering if I could thread the shuttle again. Before long, I was surrounded with books and markers. The olaid could see there was something desperate there. She asked me more than once about who I’d met in Israel. There were a couple of Airmails from Germany. One from Finland.

There was still money in the bank and the grant came through OK. The olaid told me there was nothing she needed for the house but she’d been happy looking after the wee car for me. She took her old pal from Westview for a spin now and again. Folk didn’t talk to each other the same, in the new houses.

She nagged me to get out of the history books and dig out my fishing tackle. She remembered I was always buried in angling books. Catalogues from Abu, Sweden. When I was young, I’d show her photos of astonishing and exotic pike and perch from Swedish and Finnish lakes. This fish pornography had taken over from Enid Blyton.

I remembered a standing invite, from two other volunteers. This was a couple, into boats and into catching their own supper. They lived on a small island in the Baltic. You took a ferry from Stockholm to Turku, then a bus which would drop you at a road-end. Half a mile walk to a regular ferry. They’d pick me up the other end. She had been born on the island. Her man was an American who had settled in Canada, after getting over the border to dodge the draft. He still couldn’t return to the USA. Everyone had good English.

They were still analysing their own experience in the land we called Israel. How the actual compared with what they’d imagined beforehand. What they now read about the settlers’ determination to hold on to their hard-won gains.

Then there was the perch fishing. Saltwater perch grew to a very good size. You could cast a spinner from just outside the door. I took one that would do for a starter for us all. Two friends from another island were coming for a supper of elk.

That’s how I heard this tale from a Polish artist on a Swedish-speaking Finnish island. (Did you get all that?)

‘Please call me Andrew. I think you might have difficulty with the Polish version of my name.’ Andrew had married a Finnish woman and taught at Turku and Helsinki universities, for years.

He picked happily at the white flakes still holding to the vertical-striped skin, baked in a crust of salt. ‘Very Biblical,’ he said.

He was retired now. He seemed amazed to find we were getting the banter going. ‘Are you laughing to be polite?’ he asked.

‘No, I’m laughing because you’re funny.’

‘No-one in this country finds my stories funny.’

I thought at the time, this was strange. You would think Poland and Finland had strong similarities in their unfortunate histories. Both had been invaded and torn up between feuding empires. You would think there would be some common ground in the darkest breed of bitter irony. Maybe you needed to know the language to savour Finnish humour. But my new friend was completely fluent.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘are you religious?’

‘You know I am. Unless you’ve been asleep for the last hour. I went to the Holy Land to make comparisons. In my last week, there was one man who walked streets out of his way to make sure I found the way to the bus station, when I asked directions. It was like being in Glasgow. He was a Jordanian Christian.’

‘Not a Samaritan?’ the Canadian said.

Andrew continued. ‘I mean religious with a capital R. Easily offended?’

‘Try me.’

I laughed. My new friend was surprised. He asked again if I was being polite. But if there was any ice intact on this mild June evening, on an island in the Baltic, circa 1978, it was melted now.

The geographies and the complex histories proved convenient for the invaders who came on the rampage, from either east or west. You just blame an atrocity on the other guy. Strange that both of them had a moustache.

It was a long time after the leader with the heavier and wider model shed the mortal, that there was any sign of the Russian state coming close to an admission of responsibility for approximately 20,000 counts of murder in the woods of Katyn.

You could thus argue that the Second World War began and ended in Polish territory. It was inevitable that the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia would be overrun by the Nazis. The borderline with Poland was the test of the standpoints and alliances. Polish authorities had no doubts about the invasion to come. That’s why they handed over everything they’d discovered, towards the deciphering of messages encrypted by the German forces’ Enigma machines. They gave their information to both Britain and France.

And sure enough an incident was staged to show an apparent infringement of the territory of the Third Reich. It was another couple of years before I’d see an example of how this was reported to the German public.

It was of course at another reunion of volunteer workers, wondering how the hell they had thought it a good idea to support the efforts of those who mainly denied any rights to the previous occupiers of the land they’d taken over. History implies the use of hindsight as a tool.

Gabriele Richter’s mother was hospitable towards her daughter’s friend. She must have been one of the few Germans who failed to destroy her cherished documentation of the myth of Adolf. Frau Richter’s carefully bound copies of the collected, illustrated instalments of the life and actions of Adolf Hitler told me more than any analysis I’ve ever read. You know the word Führer might suggest a guide or teacher as well as a
leader. There’s a lot of children and dogs and smiling but on this occasion even the benevolent Führer has lost his patience with the threats from the Polish people. They were astray and in need of strong leadership. That’s one way of presenting an invasion.

But since I really am preaching now, ladies and gentleman, I exhort you. Go thee now. Go and perform the latter-day action which is known unto the multitude as a google. Do a google on blitzkrieg. I did it to check the spelling.

The term is currently being applied to matters of commerce. That’s worse than the guys in the temple.

‘You have taken the house of my father and turned it into a den of thieves.’

You’ll know me now – the use of language is sacred to me. I’m hearing the whine of these hellish Stukas. Using that fucking word, that fucking way, is criminal.

End of rant within rant. Back to my home island.

In the same way as the First World War did not end for the people of the Hebridean Long Island on the 11th of the 11th of the 11th, 1918, the Second could not end for the Polish people until a leader visited the site of the mass grave. In 1992 a step was made when the Russian administration released documents which proved that Stalin’s Politburo had approved, on the 5th March 1940, the proposal to order the killings.

Vladimir V Putin did not apologise but he did say the following, as reported by the
New York Times
(Michael Schwirtz, April 7th 2010). The words within quotemarks are still qualified:

‘In this ground lay Soviet citizens, burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers, shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army, executed by the Nazis.’

But a photograph does indeed show yet another powerful wee guy laying his wreath. I don’t think the government of the United Kingdom has apologised yet for advertising the wreck of
Iolaire
, for sale to the highest bidder, before all the missing bodies had been recovered. There’s probably a record on file somewhere but I can’t tell you offhand how many pieces of silver they got, for all that bronze and teak.

His mother and my father died within a year of each other. Robbie’s loss came first. Our flat had become the Shetland family home while his mother was at Foresterhill Hospital. I made big pans of soup and we bought ham and things to go with it. His father seemed to be taking it not too bad, if you could judge that. It wasn’t as if they weren’t expecting it. Some weeks had gone by since she’d been taken down on the air ambulance. Still, it’s hard when it comes.

Then came the complications of flying the coffin home. I don’t know the details, only that Robbie and his uncle were trying this, trying that. Tension mounting. Then again, most of the family was in Aberdeen anyway. There were plenty of Shetlanders buried in that city and at least it was by the sea.

I bought and borrowed clothes that weren’t jeans and genseys. Walked behind Robbie and his family and watched his mother’s coffin lowered, under a skyline of steelwork, within reach of the floodlights of Pittodrie. Call it halfway between the estuaries of the Don and the Dee. You couldn’t see them but I knew the stake nets were stretched out, between groynes, only over a wall or two. If an Islander had to be buried in a city, this would do.

Robbie’s father gave me a pocketknife. It was slim with a very smooth wooden handle and a blade that took an edge. He made me give him a coin in return. So the friendship would never be cut. Did I know that one? He didn’t say if each partner in the contract had to keep the knife or the coin, forever.

Then it was a blur of studies. I took to swimming, way back in the wake of Robbie. But still using up all the useless physical energy that the anxiety
in your body was providing. I suppose we were both fit as butchers’ dogs then, so sitting on our arses in various libraries didn’t come too naturally.

My year flowed into that summer job and the death of my own father, without any intimation. That was a word from all these church announcements – the following are the intimations.

The olman was already up, with the kettle on the go when I heard the alarm tell me it was half an hour till the mail van left. I was getting a lift out to the road-end. He’d been trying out a new pattern, laying colours together, trial and error, till they seemed somehow happy. He didn’t do much weaving himself any more, just somehow got into this thing of designing patterns. In fact, pattern was the wrong word. He’d started off studying the market, coming up with the template for export goods. But the materials, texture as well as colour, were leading somewhere else.

In his hands they took on a life of their own.

He came out to the stairway, sniffing the morning. You could see a trace of mist in the gap between the buildings. The light was trying to break through. It would burn off in an hour or two. The flat still belonged to the Mill. Maybe the only one still active then, that part of town. Our very own wee industrial landscape. Power station and all. You got used to the timbre of the diesels, running on heavy oil.

In one way he liked a bit of bustle, getting breakfasts done, cups of tea for visitors. My olman was on his best form before most of the household was awake or after folk had gone to bed. If he’d outlived his wife, he’d have been a good hand at seeing to the visitors. As long as he had a window of the kitchen open. It wasn’t a big room. The house had no outlook, except another roughcast wall but he needed to know there was an airflow.

I’ve told you how I heard the news. Out at the estate. My uncle and Colin, the gamekeeper, must have had a conspiracy going. Following the doctor’s advice on how to break it. And they had some experience between them. They were both in the Legion. Give him time to prepare himself.

Tell him his father is not well and it looks serious. You don’t tell anyone right away that a heart has stopped beating. A nose and a mouth are no longer registering the air, passing through a system.

I remember wondering if a body still shook and muscles moved with the nerves, after the blood stopped circulating. The oxygen missing. I’d seen plenty fish die. I hope to hell it was fast. The panic of being caught without the chance of air. Pure bloody merry hell for anyone. But what must that be like for a guy who already knew what it was like to be trapped in a tight space? Because his death was so sudden, a lot of people came up these cold concrete stairs to sit in the flat for a while. This was no bad thing because all the rounds of making tea, seeing to the fire and shaking hands – all that stuff gave us something to do. It was hardest on my mother who had just to sit. The sister came into her own, once she got over the travel. She was struggling all right but already she’d had a few years of attending people as they passed in and out of the world.

The olaid didn’t want a real Island wake, for her Lewis husband. She got one all the same. Ruairidh took me aside. My olman always had his own way of doing things. But he wouldn’t want to make a big fuss. The village people were here.

The olman wouldn’t have wanted the sermon we got. But he’d have put up with it. So we did for him, as he would have wanted which was just the most normal way. It took my sister and the olaid to make a stand where it mattered. I’m not sure things were the same again, between us and our uncle.

It was easy to sort things out with the Uni, to arrange to take a year out. Everyone accepted the need. I phoned Robbie. Well, hell, he’d not long been there, himself. And he kent another Shetlander, on a one-year course, so he could take my room. We could all return to normal, after that.

I’d come to Aberdeen for a week, just to sort things out. I couldn’t leave all that driftwood shelving, roped and balanced like a pilot-ladder. Some people liked to sit in a bit more comfort than a basket fender could provide. And it wasn’t everyone who was willing to step over all the maritime debris before they could make a cup of tea.

Robbie met me off the train. The Shetlandic flatmate. We took as much as we dared back on the Number One bus to where we’d found it. The driver knew my ways. We got off at the Bridge of Don, on the north side where the beach carries on past the wreck of that trawler. All the way to Balmedie. We didn’t go anything like as far as that. Only placed
everything back above what seemed to us to be the High Water Springs mark. Our own ritual. It was easier than finding a skip with some space. Things you gather, things you dump. From the shore, back to the shore.

That year just went. But I got the details of the progress of the Russian Revolution and the events following the collapse of the Nazi-Soviet pact clear in my mind. I wasn’t ready to go back to Uni. Then there was the kibbutz. That changed my life in a way I could never have imagined. Then there was the trip to Finland. Archipelagos and fish.

I also got to know my mother better. We’d sit a while in the kitchen having coffee after a meal. Mine black, hers made with milk. Maybe she needed a wee break from me. We got through the last few months OK. Maybe Gabriele’s visit helped.

Then I’d to get the degree finished, in Aberdeen. Robbie’s offer of a break in Shetland sounded good. Less of a jump from the quiet life at home back to the course and the city. A thing you had to do. Pick things up again. I still had a bit of money from the hospital job. Herself was cool as always. She just said, ‘Aye, definitely. You should definitely dae that.’

Maybe she needed to pick her own things up. Her own way. Ready for it. Kirsty had a few more months on the Island. An overlap. She’d call by more often when I was away.

I had to go via Aberdeen anyway, to get the ferry to Shetland. I only stopped off long enough to dump my gear. The flat was sad. An orange carpet had been thrown down over the old Wilton in my room. It smelled of parties.

Maybe I had a lot of talking to catch up on because I got yarning to people, on the ferry. Drank a lot of stewed coffee and didn’t manage to sleep much.

So this was Lerwick, the working harbour, with new buildings of sheet metal. Central streets more picturesque than Stornoway. The stone-built architecture had a bit more integrity. Less of the Sixties showing.

So here I was. ‘Good to see you.’

Robbie’s father had got painfully thin but of course I said, ‘You’re looking well.’ I think I said too much. And it was daft to go raking about in the rucksack then and there. It was fine to take out the smoked salmon but I should have left the other brown paper parcel for the right moment.

I was thinking back to when I’d found it. Part of the clear-out. The design, in progress on my own father’s frame. The one I found in the shed up from the town when the house quietened down at last. Wondering how to take it off without unravelling it.

Realising it was more or less complete. Two sections with a plain bit for a break in between. Of course it was all clear, a piece for the sister, piece for me. I don’t think the olaid had ever been in the loom shed. That was a place her man went to, on his own, in the morning. Came back from it in the middle of the day. That used to be dinnertime and then it became lunchtime.

My sister was still white from the suddenness. She had never spent much time in the shed either. But I could see it meant a lot to her to see these signs of our father’s creative work as well as his living. The only really personal signs of his life. It was difficult for her to book that flight back to her own life. She had some photographs and her share of that last cloth.

But there was another few small sections, already completed and stored, on the shelving, wrapped loosely in brown paper. Cloth my father probably had no idea of selling. My mother didn’t show much emotion when I showed it to her. Didn’t break down at the sight of it or anything. She unwrapped what was there. She took her keepsake, a throw to put over the settee that was now starting to show its own age. That’s all she wanted. We were to share out the rest.

My sister chose another small piece. That was about all she could take on the plane. So I had one last section of the small amount of tweed that was made without an eye to any market. Here it was, in a new brown paper parcel, brought all these slow miles up the North Sea.

Imported to Shetland. For Robbie’s olman. The guy who gave me a pocketknife after the funeral of his wife.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I just can’t take that. I’ve never been that good wi presents and that’s a thing you should keep.’

Don’t know how he just sensed that this was something that should have stayed on another Island.

Canny guys, Shetlanders.