The Speckled People (14 page)

My mother smiles at me with her new teeth and says it’s all forgotten now. Everything can be repaired, she says, except your memory. A lot worse happened to other people, things we should not forget. The Germans broke their teeth, she said. But you can’t be thinking about things not happening. You can be careful to make sure it never happens again, but you can’t be still trying to stop things after they’ve happened. She laughs and smiles again, with her eyes, too, this time. And then she starts singing the song about the man kissing the dog.

My father took over the
Kinderzimmer
. That’s the room we play in and keep our toys in, the room most people call the dining room. It’s the room with the mashed potato still on the ceiling. Now my father says he’s going to start a new factory and he needs a place where he can make things. First of all he built a workbench in one corner that’s so heavy it can never be moved again. It has a vice at one end and lots of space underneath for spare pieces of wood that might be needed later. Then he made a press on the wall where he could hang up lots of tools like chisels and a saw and a wooden mallet. And before you start buying anything like wood or glue or screws, before you even start measuring and sawing, you have to have an idea. You have to draw a plan.

My father has great ideas for things that are badly needed in Ireland, like
Wägelchen
. They have lots of them in Germany, my mother says, but none in Ireland. So he drew a picture of one that looked just like a box with lots of measurements. He can see it in his head. He can see exactly what it will look like when it’s finished, a German boxcar with stickers of forests and mountains and fairy tales stuck on to the sides. He calls it the prototype and we’re allowed to watch while he works every evening after he comes home.

‘Is it for us?’ Maria asks.

‘Yes and no.’

‘Is it for Ireland?’

‘Yes and no.’

He keeps frowning as he works. He has to concentrate hard and you can see the tip of his tongue coming out the side of his mouth. He says you have to measure everything twice because you can only cut once. Then you see the sawdust falling on the floor like snow. You see wooden curls falling like blond hair. There are some thin, cut-off pieces of wood, too, that look like swords for us to fight with. Sometimes you can hear him whistling a tune as he works every night until it’s very late. Even long after we go to bed you can still hear the sound of the hand-drill squeaking and sometimes the mallet banging, until my mother goes into the
Kinderzimmer
to put her arm around him and tell him the world wasn’t made in one day either and there’s plenty of time tomorrow. But he still wants to finish one more little thing and after that it’s quiet again with everyone asleep.

One night he was working so late it was after midnight. You could hear him sanding all the time and it sounded like he was telling everyone to be quiet.

‘Shish … Shish … Shish …’ he kept saying.

Then there was a smell of paint in the whole house that was nicer than any other smell in the world. And in the morning when we got up, the first
Wägelchen
was standing all ready in the hallway, painted red with black wheels and a rope for pulling tied at the front. My mother clapped her hands and said it was beautiful, just like one of the toy trolleys she had when she was small. There was a new baby in our house called Ita and everybody was always gathering around her and trying to make her
smile. My mother took the baby and laid her in the new red
Wägelchen
so that we could make her smile and my father could take a photograph. And then it’s time for him to go to work with the trolley under his arm and a list that my mother typed up of all the things that went into it, how much everything cost, from the wood to the wheels, down to the cheapest thing which is the glue.

In the shops in Dublin, they kept saying it was beautiful but too expensive. Even when my father told them it was made in Ireland, even when he showed them the list of materials and explained how long he spent working on it, they still shook their heads and said nobody in Ireland had the money to spend on a boxcar. A boxcar is not something people buy in shops, no matter how beautiful it is. When he walked around the city at lunchtime every day with the
Wägelchen
under his arm, people stopped to ask him where he got it. Which doesn’t mean they want to buy it or that the shops want anything that’s handmade. But that doesn’t stop him either. Every night after he comes home on the train he goes into the
Kinderzimmer
to work on the next one. Because one day, he says, Irish people will stop buying only things that are made in Britain. One day Ireland will have its own great inventions.

Everybody in our house is busy working and inventing things. Franz is making a bridge with Meccano and Maria is learning how to knit. If my father is not busy making more trolleys, then he’s in the greenhouse sowing trays of seeds so that he can plant as many different flowers as possible when the summer comes. There will be lots to eat as well like cabbage and peas and tomatoes from the greenhouse. My mother is busy all the time, too, trying to make the new baby talk and eat up, but Ita just keeps moving around and my mother has to chase her. She sits
on the potty all day and my mother is still trying to make her eat the last spoon. Ita knows the fastest way of getting around the house, sitting on the potty and pulling herself along by the heels of her shoes without saying a word because she still hasn’t swallowed the last spoon and her mouth is full. My mother is trying not to spend money, and one day she bought a big tongue from the butcher, a cow’s tongue which she said was very cheap and tasty. We got up on the chairs to look at it curled up in a big jar on the kitchen windowsill, beside Our Lady. It was purple and grey, with lots of little spikes and cracks. Maria stuck her own tongue out to look at in the mirror and I thought of what it would be like to put your tongue in the vice, because that’s what my mother said she would have to do with the cow’s tongue. She said she would boil it and press it in the vice.

Some days when my father is at work, I go into the
Kinderzimmer
and make my own inventions. I put lots of things into the vice and squeeze them as hard as I can until they change shape. Franz, too, likes to crush down the hard-boiled sweets to dust. I have some English words in my head that I want to keep saying out loud because I like them. Don’t forget the fruit gums, chum. I get bits of wood and spare buttons to see how long it takes before they bend or break. And all the time I say my secret words, don’t forget the fruit gums, chum.

One day I got a splinter in my foot from running on the floorboards in my bare feet. But my father knew what to do right away. He got a needle and told me to put my foot up on the table. He took off his glasses and started to sting me with the needle, until I pulled my foot away. I thought it would hurt, but he said nothing hurts except what’s in your head. Then he slowly lifted the skin with the needle and got
it out without hurting, and afterwards he showed me the tiny splinter that caused so much trouble and everybody was smiling because there was no pain at all.

‘There’s no such thing as pain,’ my mother said. ‘The only pain is when you’re ashamed. When you’re ashamed, everything hurts.’

It’s true because one day when I stole money out of her coat pocket, she brought me into the front room and tried to hit me on the legs with her hand. It didn’t hurt because she’s not very good at it. But I was ashamed and I had nothing to say. I just felt sorry and that was much worse. My father is better at punishment, and one day when he heard that I brought English words into the house, he was very angry. I couldn’t stop saying ‘don’t forget the fruit gums, chum’ and hitting other people like Franz and Maria because the words were stuck to my mouth and I had to keep hitting people even if I didn’t want to. My father knew what to do. He picked out a stick in the greenhouse and said we had to make a sacrifice. He brought me up the stairs and my mother closed all the doors in the house so that nobody would hear anything. When we got up to the landing, my father said we would kneel down and pray that he was doing the right thing for Ireland. We kneeled down and asked God how many lashes he thought was fair and my father said fifteen. I was hoping that God said no lashes, because I didn’t mean it and maybe it was better for Ireland to give me a last chance. But my father heard God saying fifteen and not one less. So then he brought me into a room and told me to lie down on the bed and take down my trousers. I heard the stick whistling through the air, but it didn’t hurt at all because I knew I was making a sacrifice. My father told me to count up to fifteen to make sure that he didn’t forget what number he
was on or leave one out. I wish I never learned to count in Irish and when it was over we had to kneel down again and say thanks to God. I was ashamed because I thought everybody in the world was laughing at me now. That’s worse than anything that can happen with a stick, when everybody is laughing. Even if you squeeze your finger in the vice, even if you squeeze your tongue in the vice, it’s not as bad as when you’re ashamed and can’t speak.

I know that people laugh at our family. I know that we are funny people because we don’t speak English while we’re eating our dinner or playing with cars on the granite steps outside the house. We are funny because my father goes into a hardware shop to buy wood in Irish from a man who can also speak the language. We’re funny because we’re German and my mother just closes the doors and keeps saying the same things over and over again and telling everybody that it’s not good to win and it’s better to pretend that there’s no such thing as pain and nobody can make you smile and you should keep saying the silent negative all the time. On the street I feel ashamed because they know I got the stick on the backside and I can’t speak English. My father says we don’t care about the people outside, because we’ll show them how to be Irish. We have to be as Irish as possible and make a sacrifice.

Then my father sits down and tells me the story of his grandfather again, Tadhg Ó Donnabháin Dall, Ted O’Donovan Blind. He was called O’Donovan Blind, not because he was blind himself but because he was the son of somebody who was blind. He was an Irish speaker with a beard who wrote books, a land-surveyor by profession and he travelled a lot around west Cork all his life and loved poetry in the Irish language.

In Munster where my father comes from, there were lots
of poets who spoke and wrote their own language. But that was long ago when people still spoke Irish all over and poets were welcomed in every house and treated like kings. If a poet came to the door of a big house where the noble people lived, my father says, they were offered food and a bed for the night. If you were nice to them, if you had a party and made them feel welcome, then they would write long poems telling the whole world how generous and how cultured you were. But if you were mean and turned them away, they’d write bad poems about you that would put you to shame. They were called the bards, and what happened one day was that the people who looked after the poets, the earls and all the other noble people, lost the war with the British and had to leave their houses and flee to France. There was no place for the poets to go, so they disappeared as well and Ireland was left without any poetry for a while.

After that, the Irish people didn’t know where they were going any more, because the names of the streets and villages were changed into English. People lost their way because they didn’t recognise the landscape around them. Léim Uí Dhonnabháin became Leap. Gleann d’óir became Glandore and Cionn tSáile became Kinsale. People’s names were changed, too. Ó Mathúna became O’Mahony and Ó hUrmoltaigh became Hamilton. My father says the Irish were all stumbling around, not knowing who they were or who they were talking to. They could not find their way home. They were homeless. And that was the worst pain of all, to be lost and ashamed and homesick.

And that’s how my great-grandfather became blind, because he was descended from a poet who had lost his way and went blind. Ted O’Donovan Blind got a job as a surveyor and travelled around west Cork all his life,
speaking Irish and reciting some of the old Gaelic poems to make people feel at home. But it was too late, because most people were already speaking English and following the English road signs. And nobody wanted their children to speak Irish any more for fear that they would not be able to find their way in places like America and Canada and Australia.

Gaelic in Ireland is called Irish, so that Irish people will remember what country they’re living in. Some people say that the Irish language reminds them of the big famine when they had nothing to eat except the old poems in Irish. My father says people transferred everything they owned into English, their stories and their songs, even all their memories and their family photographs. They deny that Irish has anything to do with them any more, but some of their ways of saying things come down from the old bards, even if they don’t know it. Time didn’t just begin in Ireland with the English language, he says. And just because they all speak English so well doesn’t mean the Irish are not blind any more or that they know where they’re going. There are some things you can only remember in Irish.

‘One day the Irish people will wake up and wonder if they’re still Irish,’ he says.

And that’s why it’s important not to bring bad words like fruit gum into the house. That’s why it’s important to work hard and invent lots of new things in Ireland and fight for small languages that are dying out. Because your language is your home and your language is your country. What if all the small languages disappear and the whole world is speaking only one language? We’ll all be like the Munster poets, he says, lost and blind, with nothing to welcome them only doors banging in the
wind. We’re living on the eve of extinction, my father says. One day there will be only one language and everybody will be lost.

‘The world will be full of homesick people,’ he says.

In the evenings, my father stays outside in the garden as long he can because it’s still bright. It’s time to plant all the flowers and vegetables, and to get rid of flowers like dandelions that he doesn’t want. There are pink and white flowers growing out of the granite walls, too, that look beautiful but everybody hates them, because they’re wild and wreck the walls and make a good hiding place for snails. There are bushes that only grow by the sea with purple flowers, too, and leaves that keep growing from the inside so that when you peel off the outer leaves it’s never-ending, until you get to a tiny green bud inside. My father says all plants were wild once and he’s growing sweet peas. And then he always lights a fire that crackles and whistles. You can’t see any flames, but you can see lots of smoke going all over the garden, as if he’s sending a message all around the world.