The Sailor in the Wardrobe (6 page)

‘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 going now,’ he said.

I tried to make him stay but he didn’t want trouble. He doesn’t want to witness anything like my mother witnessed in Germany. I told him not to be so scared of things, but he was suddenly gone from my side. And maybe it’s easier when I’m on my own, to feel that I belong to them now.

As soon as the fire brigade pulled up outside the railings, the jeers began from inside. Cursing and booing. Somebody said it was a riot, but the firemen ignored it all and smiled. It wasn’t so long ago that they were doing this kind of thing themselves, but now it was their duty to put it out. They un-spooled the hose and directed the water at the flames. As the fire began to hiss, the boys started throwing things, empty beer cans and loose branches. Then it was sods of grass which they picked up all around them in the park, harmlessly hitting the black uniforms of the firemen as if they didn’t even notice.

I belonged to the Irish fire now. I was carried away by the anger of the crowd and had no option but to pick up a sod of my own, not so much to hit anyone but to prove that the fire mattered as much to me as it did to them. The firemen were reducing the great flames to nothing. You could feel the heat fading and the shouts becoming more hostile. Bastards. Fuckers. I heard myself joining in. Words I had only heard them use against me, now became my words too.

More sods were thrown. Bigger ones. This time I picked up the heaviest sod I could find. I pulled at the
long grass until a large clump of earth came loose and it felt like I was holding a severed head by the hair. I could hardly swing it around me. The trouble was that when I let go, I discovered my aim was a lot better than I imagined. I could already see that it was going to hit one of the firemen directly in the head. It flew through the yellow air like a black skull with grassy golden hair flying back. I could see the shock in his eyes as the sod crashed into the side of his face, just as he turned his head around.

‘You little bastard,’ he shouted.

He wiped his eyes and brushed bits of soil out of his collar, then straightened his helmet.

‘Sorry, mister,’ I said.

I wanted to tell him I didn’t actually mean to hit him. But it was already too late for that because the boys around me were cheering.

‘Great shot.’

‘Look, he knocked the fuckin’ head off a fireman.’

For the first time ever, I had done something which made me into a hero. I would be accepted now. They were saying the Germans were amazing marksmen to be able to hit somebody from that distance with a sod. Every time I would walk down the street from now on, they would think of me as the guy who clobbered the fireman. I would no longer be an outsider and they would be clapping me on the back, asking me to do it again, to see if I could break a street light with a stone. But as they kept cheering and laughing, I knew they were making things worse for me, because now I had the fireman to deal with.

‘Sorry,’ I said once more. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

I saw the rage in the fireman’s face and ran away, hoping that he wouldn’t follow me. I heard the sound of him cursing and his heavy boots thudding in the grass
behind me. There was no escape. I was going to arrive at the railings and be trapped, away from the fire and away from the crowd, with nobody coming to stand by me.

At the corner, I turned around to beg for mercy with my hands up. There was a gap in the railings, but I didn’t really believe I could get away. I knew there were bars missing in other places, where boys crossed the park rather than walking all the way around. I was too numb to think of escaping, so got ready to surrender.

‘Please mister, don’t hit me,’ I said. ‘It was an accident.’

The fireman slowed down to a walk because he knew he had me cornered. Even in the darkness I could see from his eyes that he was not going to show me any mercy. At that last minute, I decided to try and climb through the bars. I felt his hand on my neck and heard his voice saying ‘little fucker’ in my ear. He was too big to get through the gap himself, but his arm was stretched out through the bars holding on firmly to my clothes.

‘Stop him,’ he shouted at some men walking by on their way to Eagle House for a drink. He tried to drag me back in through the gap and I was pulling away with my foot up against the railings.

‘Hold the little bastard for me.’

Some of the boys came up to see what was happening. They had lost interest in the fire which was almost gone out by now.

‘Look, it’s Eichmann,’ one of them said.

They had turned against me. They no longer saw me as a hero who had done something to defend the big fire. It was a mistake to have even tried getting in with them, because they were on the side of the fireman now, staring at me through the bars, waiting to see what would happen. All I could think of doing was to chop at the
fireman’s hand and release myself from his grip.

‘Get him,’ the fireman shouted, and some of the men outside the railings began to converge on me. One of them with a red face threw down his cigarette and stepped into my way. I dodged him, but he came after me until he started coughing and stood still. I felt their hands on me, but I managed to twist and pull away from them each time, even when they put a foot out to trip me. Another man came after me, but the change in his pockets started falling out and rolling towards the gutter, with him cursing and calling me a whore and bending down to pick up his money.

I was afraid to run further into the terraces. I tried to turn back, but some of the boys had begun to come through the gap in the fence.

‘It’s Eichmann,’ they were shouting. ‘After him.’

I was running down their streets. Rockets were going off all around me. Children staring at me through their masks. Women standing outside their houses smoking and talking, watching me running past with my shirt and my jumper torn. Some of the doors were wide open and you could see right into the front rooms where the television was on. I thought the women were going to get out the dustbin lids and start banging. One of the women was laughing or coughing, I didn’t know which, and a terrier dog ran out barking and chasing after me because he knew I didn’t belong to that street.

Then I remembered how this happened to my mother, a long time ago, when she was small. She told me how the Kaiser girls played on the Buttermarkt Square in Kempen, right in front of their house, and sometimes they clogged up the fountain with paper from their father’s stationery shop and the water swept all across the
square and the town warden complained to their father. The town warden even chased them into the house one day. But instead of protecting them, their grandmother let him right into the house to teach them a lesson that would put an end to the complaints. My mother was the only one who ran out the back door and into the streets again, while the other girls were all caught in the hallway by the warden and their grandmother, facing punishment. My mother ran through the streets of the town all afternoon, around by the Burg, by the windmill, running and running, thinking that the warden was after her all the time. Even when it got dark she was still afraid to go home. But then she was even more afraid of being left out all night, so she decided to give herself up. When she got home at last, sneaking up silently to her own house, the warden was gone, but she had to explain to her father why she had come home so late after everyone had eaten their dinner and the table was already cleared. So then she told him about the town warden chasing them into the house and how she was the only one who wasn’t caught. She expected her father to be angry, but he smiled. He put her on his knee and stroked her head until she was not so afraid any more.

Now it’s me running away, just like my mother. Now it’s the fireman and all the other bonfire boys coming after me through the streets. The fireman must have got out through the park gate because I saw him following me all the way with the boys ahead of him, running hard and catching up fast. Further back, some of the men were following, too, and I was afraid the whole city was after me. I was afraid the women would try to bar my way and that nobody would tell the fireman to have mercy on me.

At the end of the street I didn’t know which way to
turn, so I climbed up onto the roof of a parked car and from there onto a wall that had some glass shards sticking out of the top. I could see nothing below me on the far side. I couldn’t even see how deep it was. It was black down there and no matter how much I stared down, waiting for my eyes to get used to the dark, I was blind and afraid to jump. I held my hands out in front of me as if that would help me find out what was down there on the other side, desperately searching for a safe place to land. I had no idea what I was going to jump into and thought I would be impaled on spikes. I thought of vicious dogs. I thought my chin would hit a tree stump or an upturned wheelbarrow. I thought maybe there was nothing down there at all and that I would just keep falling without ever reaching the ground.

I waited on the top of the wall until they caught up with me and I could see them below on the pavement. Some of them were already getting up on the car. The fireman was reaching his arm up along the wall to try and drag me back down again. So I jumped into the unknown. I threw myself into the darkness and kept falling down, down, for ever into the dark until I disappeared.

After that I was afraid the fireman would turn up at the door of our house. If he couldn’t punish me himself, then he would try and get my father to punish me instead. I couldn’t sleep because I thought they would come and arrest me as a juvenile offender. I tried to work out what I would say, how I would lie to them and say it was dark and the fireman got it all wrong. It wasn’t me. They would call me a delinquent and ask me why I ran away if I was so innocent. The fireman would bring witnesses who would point at me and say: that’s him, Eichmann. But I would stare them all out and say it was a mistaken identity. Only my mother would be on my side and believe me.