The Sailor in the Wardrobe (15 page)

There are lots of other things happening as well. New things being invented, new food in the shops, like yoghurt. People were talking about a very fashionable new fruit called avocado. There’s lots of new music on the radio by the Rolling Stones and Perry Como and Bob Dylan singing about ‘No direction home’. Everything is moving forward into the future. Everybody loves air hostesses and nurses. There are new models of cars like the Commodore and the Cortina. And this summer, it’s obvious that things are never going to be the same again in Ireland or anywhere else, because I saw a photo on the front cover of the
Irish Press
one day of a woman in a white miniskirt and white boots and a broad white hat, lifting her weekend case onto a train while a nun in a black habit was waiting patiently behind her.

Packer sometimes talks to me about how he’s going to get a sports car. One of these days, he says, he will be driving a white, open-topped, two-seater. He’s going to grow a moustache and speed about the place and get a twenty-foot boat so we can sail around together. He talks about what’s going on in Northern Ireland and says his mother comes from up there and that she was once hit by the lash of a drumstick on the street when she was only nine years of age. She was standing by the railings, watching the Orange Parade going by, when one of the
drummers lashed her right across her neck and she still has the scar.

On TV, we watch the Loyalist Protestants march through the streets on the twelfth of July, celebrating their most important day, the day that King Billy won the battle of the Boyne. They are called the Orange Order and they march through Catholic Nationalist areas of Belfast with Lambeg drums and flutes called fifes. My father makes a joke about them and says they’re worse than Agent Orange and they could defoliate the entire rainforest with their noise. He worked up there for the British army, just after he qualified from university as an engineer, and says the sound is deafening. They use flexible drumsticks and some of them will play those things for twelve hours until their hands are bleeding with hatred. They beat those drums every year to ensure that nobody forgets about their history. It’s the only way to keep your memory alive, that is to make as much noise as possible, my father says. The bigger the drum the less likely it is that people will forget.

My mother says it’s the British Loyalists and the Irish Nationalists telling each other that they have a longer memory. She watches the marchers and cannot understand why there is so much trouble about it, with people rioting and setting buses on fire. She says it’s not such a bad thing, men marching around with drums like massive bellies in front of them. But my father says she’s making a big mistake, because the Lambeg drum is an instrument that is intended to offend Catholics and remind them that they don’t belong in their own country.

‘It’s not that simple,’ my father says. ‘You can’t always put Irish history through the German sieve. It’s Loyalists marching against the Nationalists, just to antagonize
them. It’s people who refuse to be Irish making noise to drown out the people who want to be Irish.’

‘Why don’t they join in with them?’ my mother asks.

My father smiles and it’s clear that she’s using German history to try and resolve what’s happening in Ireland today. She is always making comparisons, saying that the Irish think with their hearts and the Germans think like the horses, only with their heads. She tries to stay positive and keeps asking why the Nationalists don’t just get one or two drums of their own and join in. She thinks they are all children up there in different gangs and if they could only come together they would have a great time in one big band. My father tries to explain that the Nationalists have been kept down for years and that the Loyalists want everything for themselves. The drummers are the playground bullies who want to torment everyone else and remind them that they are the favourites with the British teachers.

‘Why be offended?’ my mother asks. ‘You can only be offended if you want to be.’

‘It’s aggression,’ my father says. ‘Naked aggression, deliberately walking through Catholic areas to provoke them.’

My mother keeps trying and I like the new way that she has found to argue with my father, a kind of talented optimism that drives him mad. She thinks you can win people over by capitulating, by being so friendly that the aggressor has nothing to fight against. She always told us not to be interested in winning, never to strike back, never to become like the fist people. She says they should invite the Loyalists into their areas and tell them they are welcome to march down their streets and make as much noise as they like. They should invite them into their
houses for cups of tea and make little cakes for them with hundreds and thousands on top, because sooner or later the kindness will spread and they will stop getting any fun out of provocation. They both want the same thing in the end, don’t they, they both want peace. Who cares what flag you’re waving? In fifty years’ time, she says, they will all be marching together and it will be like one of those great street festivals they have in Rio de Janeiro, like the Fastnacht carnival in Germany, with people dancing all day and all night, and visitors coming from around the world to join in. It will be the festival of forgiveness, the festival of kindness winning over aggression.

My father shakes his head. ‘It won’t work,’ he says. ‘I’ve been up there. I’ve tried talking to them.’

He slaps his hand on his forehead and begins to make another speech. He says the Nationalists in Northern Ireland have tried everything. They tried capitulation, just like the Jewish people tried being soft and submissive in Germany and it didn’t work there either. Now it’s my father who starts putting Irish history through the German sieve. He always has to have the last word and says the Irish have to make their own noise. We have to make ourselves heard with our own language, our songs and poetry and stories, because that’s the only way to stop yourself from being drowned out and becoming extinct. You have to keep staying alive in your own language.

Day by day, things are getting worse up there with car bombs going off in the streets. My mother finds it hard to understand why. She cuts out a picture from the newspaper of a wrecked street and puts it into the diary along with all the other nightmares. You could see buildings almost completely destroyed, the windows blown out, curtains hanging out and injured people being
brought away. At night in black and white, under the flash of cameras, the blood looks black and the faces very pale. People look dazed and half asleep as they walk away with their hair full of white dust. My mother says she saw lots of things like this before with her own eyes and it reminds her of Germany during the bombing of the cities. She takes in a sharp breath and shakes her head.

‘Schon wieder,’
she says. ‘Not again.’

She says it makes her sick. She saw this kind of thing during the war when she was bringing soup to Mainz. She knew the city when it was so beautiful. The next time she saw it she could hardly believe it was the same place. She kept losing her way. She said that some parts of the city just looked like open ground, with piles of rubble. Many of the buildings were cut down to half their size, with furniture and beds hidden underneath the debris. Some houses still had one or two walls left standing and you could see pictures hanging on their hooks and curtains untouched as if nothing had happened. She heard of people being killed by those falling walls, long after the bombing was over. You could see the horizon where a street had disappeared. Some of the houses left standing were black and burned out and still smoking. People were talking about phosphor as if it was some kind of disease that had spread across the city. They were saying that some of the people were not recognizable, they were so badly burned. People burned alive in the cellars like rags, holding on to each other, with cups and jugs lying beside them intact. One boy rescued his family from the inferno by breaking into a disused synagogue and finding a safe place in the basement. The survivors hurried away out to the country with some of their most precious belongings on carts. Nobody knew who was alive and who had fled.
People were crying everywhere and calling each other. People digging through the rubble for their relatives even days after the bombing, calling out names and listening for an answer, covered in white dust. There were signs left up in chalk handwriting to let people know where the occupants could be found. In one of the streets there was a mass funeral, with lots of bodies lying out in a line, and my mother says she could hardly make the sign of the cross. She says she saw her own hand coming up in front of her eyes, shaking so much that she felt like an old woman.

Every time a bomb goes off on the street in Northern Ireland, I can see the look of fear in my mother’s eyes. My father too, because that’s not his way of fighting for survival.

‘It’s what they called moral bombing during the war,’ my father says. ‘The IRA are taking lessons from Churchill and Truman. Bombing cities. Bombing the vulnerable people and the children.’

‘It’s all the same nightmare factory,’ my mother says.

And then it’s time to change the subject. Pointing the finger doesn’t make you innocent, she says, as she takes out a German board game called
‘Mensch ärgere dich nicht’
which means: ‘Don’t let it get to you, man.’ It’s raining outside. There is no point in going down to the harbour, so I agree to play chess with my father. My mother puts on a lamp. There is music playing on the radio. She even takes out the bottle of cognac and pours a small glass for her and for my father, because she wants everything to be without resentment. She brings out a box of chocolates hidden in the press in the front room and it’s all chocolates and cognac smells and silence and Maria saying ‘Oh no’ when her luck runs out and she has to
go back to the beginning. We’re all great winners and losers and everybody keeps playing and concentrating. The only noise you can hear is the rain outside and the sound of Bríd as she keeps breathing up and down. My mother puts her arms around her and looks over at the chess board to see how things are going between me and my father.

‘Whose move is it?’ she asks.

‘It’s my move,’ I tell her.

She admires the way we can play without speaking a word. My father taught me chess and I’ve only beaten him once, when he was still being polite, showing me my mistakes. For a long time we were courteous, warning each other about possible dangers. Mind your queen. Did you forget about your castle? It wasn’t about winning but more about learning and enjoying the great moves you could make. My father never wanted to win against me and I didn’t want to beat him either, so we kept avoiding the basic principle of chess. It was a kind of polite chess with no mean sneaky moves, no gambits. Now we’ve begun to take it seriously and don’t say a word. Even long after the others have stopped playing their board game, my father and I are still sitting across from each other, taking ages for each move.

‘Such concentration,’ my mother says. She admires the way we can become so involved in the one thing and leave all other thoughts behind. It looks like she wants to distract us, because she offers the chocolates one last time, taking off the cardboard sheet to reveal another full layer underneath. ‘Who would like a last chocolate, before they disappear?’

Everyone is looking at the box of chocolates and I pick out a toffee that is going to keep me going for a long time.
My father looks at the pictures of the sweets and the names of all the different shapes. He picks out a caramel delight and puts it into his mouth. He chews silently. I try to chew without any noise, but I have a struggle on my hands with the toffee which is like a big football in my mouth.

‘It’s still your move,’ my father reminds me.

So then I concentrate as best I can. I glue the toffee up against the ceiling of my mouth, so that it’s plastered like a gum-shield against the palate. I can’t help sucking it, but at least I don’t have to chew it any more and make swallowing noises that are very irritating when you’re playing chess. My father is waiting and when I look at the board again, I make a quick decision. It’s only afterwards that I realize what a brilliant move it is, a bit of chess genius.

My father is trapped. He’s going to lose his queen. He stares at the board, trying every possible move in his head to get out of it. I keep the toffee-shield stuck to the roof of my mouth. The whole room is silent, waiting for the end when he shakes hands with me and says I’m getting better all the time. There is no way out for him. He’s doomed. I imagine it from his side and check every possible move. I can feel a rush of excitement, knowing that I have beaten him at last. It’s not polite either to boast about your move while he’s still thinking, so I don’t say a word until he eventually looks up at me. He has a fierce look in his eyes, blinking behind his glasses, and I cannot help smiling a little because the whole thing was just a fluke.

I want to help him. Maybe I should take back the move and allow him to protect himself a little better. He looks at the situation once more, but not for long. Then he puts
his hand underneath the board and tips it over, before storming out of the room.

‘What’s going on now?’ my mother asks.

She jumps up from the table. She wanted the evening to end on a good note. The chess pieces are rolling across the table. My sister Ita bends down to pick up the fallen black king from the floor, but my mother tells her to leave it there.

‘Nobody is to touch anything.’

Everything is left there as it fell, with the chess board upside down and some of the pieces rocking back and forth, as if they were still alive and trying to get up to fight another day. My mother wants it all to stay like this, untouched, like a monument. My father had lost the ability to differentiate between a chess game and world events, as if everything is still a battle between black and white pieces. She goes up to the front room to tell him that chess is not war. She wants him to come back and not leave things as they are. She puts her arm around him, but he won’t be moved.