The Sailor in the Wardrobe (10 page)

All the time, while they were talking about Ireland, they were postponing the moment when they would have to discuss the ancient German book, the treasured gift from the time of Gutenberg which Stefan had come to claim back. My mother continued to smile and speak to him in a friendly way to make sure that he felt welcome, but I could see that she was worried underneath and maybe also a little angry or disappointed, too, that nobody remembered what she did for them. In the kitchen afterwards, while my father brought Stefan up to the front room to show him more books about Irish legends, my mother stood staring at the left-over cake as if there was something wrong with it.

‘It wasn’t always like that in Germany,’ she said.

When the war was over, my mother travelled down to Mainz on the train to try and get a job with the Americans. She had to fill in a form called the
‘Fragebogen
like everyone else, to state what organizations she had
belonged to and what she had been up to during the war. She had never joined the Nazi party. She had been drafted into the Wehrmacht, but she didn’t like to say that she was arrested as a deserter during the last winter of the war, because she thought that might reflect badly on her character.

Her records were in order, so she managed to get work with an American officer and his family in Wiesbaden. Everyone thought she was so lucky, living in a beautiful house on the hill, looking after three small American children, with lots of food at a time when everybody in Germany had nothing. My mother wanted to share this luck and started sneaking food out of the house every evening. When the children were asleep and she had some time off, she got a train to Rüsselsheim to her sister Elfriede and her family. My mother says the two boys, Bernd and Rheinhold, had grey teeth when she first went to see them, and her husband Adam was so thin after being released from captivity that every time he ate even the smallest thing he felt ill again and had to lie down. Rüsselsheim is famous for the big Opel factory where Onkel Adam now works. It’s also famous because when the Americans bombed the town during the war the people were so angry that a big crowd of them gathered in the street one day to kill some American pilots who had been captured nearby. After the war, everybody changed and became grateful to the Americans for rescuing them. The Americans went from bombing cities with explosives to bombing cities with raisins, they said. The city of Mainz was heavily destroyed, and my mother remembers seeing the people in the ruins, picking out the bricks and stacking them up to be re-used. She remembers people in the fields going on potato hunts to see if they could find
anything that the farmers had missed. She said there was a time of famine in Germany.

The lands around the house in Wiesbaden where the American officer and his family lived were guarded by soldiers and patrols in army jeeps. Every time my mother walked down the hill to the gate, her bag was searched, so she began to conceal food inside her clothes. She held a piece of cheese or meat under her cardigan. Sometimes she hung a small parcel of bread and left-over fat in a small piece of cheesecloth under her arm and walked past the checkpoint knowing that if she was caught, she would lose her job and have nothing.

One day, she had two bars of soap concealed in her stockings, at the back of her legs. She had to walk carefully to make sure the soldiers didn’t notice anything. As she walked past the checkpoint, the soldiers smiled and tried to talk to her. She knew they always looked at her legs when she continued on down the hill. She tried to walk as elegantly as possible, but then the bars of soap started slipping down inside her stockings and the soldiers must have thought German women had a funny way of going downhill. She couldn’t stop the soap slipping with her hands. Any minute, the soldiers would see two lumps sliding down around her ankles, so she put her foot up on a fence and started adjusting her stockings one by one, as if she was doing it deliberately for them. My mother says they must have imagined everything underneath her dress except the soap. Then she walked away, around the corner out of sight. After that the soldiers were friendly to her and even let her out without checking her bag. Every day, more food was being delivered to the house and every day, more and more was going back out again to feed people in Mainz.

At one time, when the officer and his family went back to America on their summer holidays, the soldiers on guard duty even allowed her to bring people into the house, to help her clean up. There was plenty of food left for three weeks, so my mother invited everybody she knew up to Wiesbaden as if it was her own place. They stayed overnight and slept in all the big beds. And when the food started running out, she decided to use up the last of it in one big party. Stefan’s mother and father came. Tante Elfriede and Onkel Adam were there as well. They all went through the rooms and lived for one evening as if they were rich Americans, putting on dresses and suits belonging to the officer and his wife, looking at themselves in the mirror and holding a fashion parade. They lit candles and had a big dinner in the dining room, with cigars from Cuba and French cognac. They put on swing music and danced around the living room. They even spoke in English to each other, my mother says, and they were laughing so much that they often had to hold on to the furniture. But then the party came to a sudden end when the family arrived back early and the house was thrown into a terrible chaos. A phone call came from the station in Wiesbaden to say that they were on their way.

The celebration turned to panic. They turned the music off and ran upstairs to put all the clothes back into the wardrobe. There was such confusion that my mother crashed head-first into her sister on the landing, and even then they could do nothing but hold on to the banisters and start laughing again until they suddenly remembered the trouble they were in. Onkel Adam went around opening all the windows in the house. The others carried things from the dining room into the kitchen, running. My mother says she has never seen the washing up being
done so fast in her life. At the last minute, her secret guests all fled out the side door and my mother only had ten minutes to walk around the house closing all the windows again before the family arrived at the door in their big American car.

She doesn’t know how they could not have known there had been a party. They must have thought my mother was smoking cigars on her own just to keep a good atmosphere in the house. There was nothing out of place, except that there was not one piece of food left over and the officer’s wife said it was about time they got back. My mother was expecting trouble but the Americans were so friendly that when they finally left Germany, they begged her to come and live in their big house in Vermont. They would send her to university. They allowed her time to make up her mind, but she decided to stay close to her own family. They left the address in Vermont and told her that if she ever changed her mind, they would get her a ticket and a visa so she could start afresh in America.

It would have been a good life there. The Americans are very much like the Germans, she says. But then she would never have made it to Ireland. My father would have been an American and we would never have had to learn Irish. We would have been speckled people, but we would never have spoken any German, because it was a time when nobody wanted to be German and nobody wanted to hear German spoken on the street. Sometimes I think about how different our lives would have been with another father, an American father or an Irish father who spoke English to us. My mother imagines what it would have been like, that other life without my father, but she says you cannot regret things too much or you
will find yourself going backwards in time and unable to move forward again.

The people in Mainz never forgot how my mother risked everything to keep bringing them food during the war and those famine years. The parents of her school friend Käthe wanted to give her some kind of gift when she finally decided to go away to Ireland. They had no money, and no belongings that could be sold on the black market. My mother didn’t want any payment for the help she gave, but Uncle Ulrich’s family was so grateful that they decided to give her an ancient book which had belonged to them for hundreds of years.

It was of no value. It could never be sold, nobody would have given even a loaf of bread for it at that time. They knew that my mother liked books, that it would be in good hands. My mother thought it was too precious for her to keep, but they forced her to take it, for all her kindness.

I’ve seen her holding the book in her hand, leafing through it as if it no longer belongs to her. I’ve seen her crying, maybe not because she might lose the book, but because what she did that time back in Wiesbaden has no value any more. Maybe that’s why she was so shocked that her cake was not accepted, because she remembers the time when people were starving and would have given anything for a piece of that cake. It was hard to believe that there was so much cake around now that people could refuse it. Hard to believe that a piece of cake could ever have been more valuable than a book from the time of Gutenberg. She would never dream of selling it and making money from it. It was one of the first printed books in the world, but that wasn’t the same as thinking it would make you rich overnight. When my mother talks about
being rich, it’s not about money or houses and cars but always about having children and having an imagination, about listening to music and holding precious books in your hand.

Will she give it away or not? One minute she fights back and says she will never let go of this book. She wants to know what right they have to demand such a thing or to claim that she was just keeping it safe for them in Ireland. She feels she has no right to keep it. All she did was help people and that’s not something for which you deserve payment. It brought its own rewards and she would be glad to do it again, any time, for nothing. But now she shuts her eyes as if the memory has no value any more, as if something that was still so recent in her own mind had been suddenly wiped away. She was beginning to think it never happened at all. Maybe the book has become so valuable in itself that it has wiped out all memory, all the laughter, all the joy of being alive after the war, all the innocence of that once-in-a-lifetime friendship.

She has thought of hiding it. She has thought of placing it in a vault, with a bank. But in the end it always goes back into the oak trunk with the heavy lid closed down again to keep the past inside.

I’ve heard my father talking to her late in the evening, saying he will never let anyone take it away from her, because it means as much to him at this stage. It was one of the first things that she showed to him when they met in Dublin after the war. He had lots of things to show her and places to bring her, like Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. She had stories to tell him about Germany and he had speeches to make about Ireland, but this book was the first thing that my mother could show him. He
remembers leafing through it, knowing that he was holding something that was very close to her heart. It was a sign that she trusted him. He said it was like the ancient books transcribed by the Irish monks, and praised the Germans for inventing printing. It was the only thing that she owned, apart from her clothes, something she had never given out of her hands to anyone before. It was the start of all their luck. It was the start of this Irish-German family and all the stories that we made up along the way. How could she give all that back?

My father has turned himself into a tour guide for Ireland. It’s his country and he’s proud to take some days off to show Stefan the most important things about Irish history. He’s a very careful driver, keeping both hands on the steering wheel and stopping the car whenever he needs to explain something that cannot be said while driving. He brings us to Kilmainham Jail. We stop outside the GPO on O’Connell Street. We drive to Glendalough to see the round tower. We stand on beaches throwing stones and holding back the waves, as if we’ve come on holidays from Germany and haven’t seen open spaces like this for a long time. We’re amazed to see sheep again. We drive into the mountains with the windows open and get the feeling of being lifted up by the landscape, by the emptiness. We stop for lunch and my mother takes out her basket with separate packages of sandwiches. She is still trying to find out what Stefan likes to eat instead of cake, but it remains a mystery to her. We sit in a field with a rug spread out on the grass and everybody laughs because Bríd has begun to chew sideways like the sheep. We go for a walk with grass stalks in our mouths and decapitate wild flowers. My father is not the kind of man who keeps a stem of grass between his lips. Even with his shirt open, he looks like he is thinking about something that still has
to be done to improve Ireland, to keep this landscape from disappearing. We climb halfway up a mountain and look back at the small grey Opel Kadett parked like a toy car along the road. We see the houses and the small people of Ireland working in the fields below us. My father holds his arm stretched out in front of him and tells Stefan to look across the landscape with his eyes open, because there are certain things that can only be seen in the Irish language.

‘In English,’ my father says, ‘you can only see as far as the eye can see.’

On the way home he is looking for Echo Gate, driving up and down country roads for a long time saying it can’t possibly be gone away. My mother points at lots of gates and tells him to stop so we can shout over them to see if we can hear anything coming back, but he drives on with a determined look on his face until he finally comes to the right place and we all stand shouting across the gate towards the ruins of the monastery. The echo is very clear. We count how many seconds it takes for a word to come back. We shout in German, with the sun going down and the cows looking up, wondering what we’re saying. It’s a perfect echo each time, as if the fields know our language. A whole family shouting back at us with great excitement, as if they had been waiting there for centuries, and this is the first time somebody has come to the gate who understands them. Our voices have come out from under the mossy stones and start calling back, hoping we don’t leave again.