The Sailor in the Wardrobe (16 page)

The rest of us are left staring at the ruins of the game on the table for a long time, waiting. But then I decide to pick up the pieces myself. I want to make it easy for him to come back and set up the board again. I want to tell him we’ll start a new game and this time I’ll try not to be so mean and sneaky. The board is ready and I want him to come back, just to play and not think of winning or losing. I wait and listen to the rain, like the sound of wheels spinning outside the window. Dozens of them spinning and whirring on their axles without stopping. Wheelbarrows. Upturned bicycles freewheeling silently. Every wheel in the world rolling along the gutters and gurgling away into the drains. I wait and wait, but he
doesn’t come and we never again play chess after that.

It’s my mother who comes back and tells me a story so that I will understand my father. She wants me to think of him as a small boy living with his mother and his younger brother Ted in the village of Leap. His mother sent him out to get milk one evening when the moon was already out. The blue dusty light was falling across the street and made the houses look like cardboard fronts. Everything looked unreal in this soft white light. He carried an enamel canteen up the road to the farm and watched the woman milking for a while. The cows were restless and he watched the tail slapping into the bucket. He heard the woman speaking to the cow as she filled the canteen with warm frothy milk. He didn’t have to give her any money right away, because his mother always paid little bits off her bills in rotation. On the way home, the moon was so bright that my father fell and dropped the canteen of milk, because he was born with a limp and couldn’t trust himself walking.

‘The moon knocked me,’ he cried, when he got home.

His mother rubbed his head and said there was no harm done. She cleaned the cut on his knee and said it was no use crying over it. She didn’t want him to think it was the limp that was to blame, so she went to the door and spoke to the moon, pointing up into the night sky. Stop trying to trick people into thinking it’s daytime. My father must have thought it was still his fault that there was no milk for the morning. And now he’s still trying to make up for it and put things right long after they’ve happened and cannot be changed any more. He’s repairing history, my mother says, trying to pick up the moonlight from the street.

There has been no news from Stefan. Weeks have gone by since he left our house and my mother is worried that he has not sent any more postcards. She received one card from a place called Kilfenora, saying thank you for all the small packages of barm brack which she had packed for him, but nothing after that. All she got was a letter from Tante Käthe, saying that she has heard nothing. They are very worried because Stefan is the kind of person who is brought up to be polite and keep in touch, but now something is preventing him from writing home.

I can’t tell my mother about the conversation I had with Stefan, because she will be even more worried. I can’t tell her how he wants to run away from his father and Kilfenora isn’t even far enough away. I think of him in the West of Ireland somewhere finding another parcel of barm brack hidden in one of the secret side pockets of his rucksack. I know what that’s like, because Franz and myself went on a cycling holiday together one summer, down to West Cork, and my mother packed our bags as if we were going to war and we might find ourselves in a place where there was nothing to eat.

At the dinner table she asks everybody to think hard and imagine where Stefan has gone to and why he hasn’t been in touch, even if only to say that he’s fine. He
doesn’t have to wait for something awful to happen before he contacts us. I can see that she is trying not to worry prematurely, but she feels responsible for any German visitor who comes to Ireland and gets lost. So we’re all sitting around thinking of Stefan eating the last piece of barm brack somewhere, taking shelter from the wind and looking out over the Atlantic. Everybody is silently searching the cliffs and the beaches in their minds. I think of him trying to learn Irish so that he can disappear completely from view and become invisible like all the other Irish speakers in Ireland. I can see him pretending to be fully Irish, trying to get rid of every trace of his German accent, giving the woman in a bed and breakfast in Kilfenora a false name, and her saying to herself that he’s a bit too tidy in his bedroom to be really Irish. I can see him moving across the mountains and the bogs, going into a pub and just nodding like everyone else and saying as little as possible, maybe telling people that he’s from Northern Ireland, from Belfast, so they don’t think his accent is strange. I can imagine the men in the pub saying that he looks a bit like the great German footballer, Beckenbauer, God bless him, and Stefan saying he wishes he was, but that he’s got two left feet and one of them is facing backwards.

So the letters are starting to go back and forth to Germany and everybody is wondering why Stefan is not in touch. After more crisis meetings and phone calls from Tante Käthe, they finally decide to call the Gardai.

It’s the first time that we’ve seen anyone in uniform in our house since I was very small, when there was a fox in the kitchen and the Garda came to tell us it was not a fox at all but a rat. This time it’s two Gardai who arrive in a squad car. They are brought into the front room and even
though my mother has asked them to sit down like any other guests, they remain standing at first. There is an older sergeant who is quite thin, and a younger, more heavy man making notes. Neighbours passing by on the street outside must be wondering what is going on, if somebody in our house has broken the law. My mother is afraid of policemen and immediately begins to talk, telling them lots of things about Stefan that are not really all that relevant, like the fact that he did very well at school and that he’s got no reason for not returning to Germany to study medicine. She is disappointed that they are not taking more notes and begins to tell other things, looking for something that they will find worthy of putting down.

My father stands at the fireplace and says nothing for a while, then suddenly breaks in to condense a number of things my mother has been trying to say into a few neat words, like a synopsis. The Gardai keep looking at her and seem to think the whole thing has more to do with her, because she is German and they have come because of Stefan, a missing German tourist. My mother shows them the card which she got from Kilfenora and the sergeant passes it on to the younger officer who looks closely at the date on the postmark and takes a note of that.

The sergeant asks what Stefan’s financial position was when he left our house and my mother says he must have run out of money by now, which is why they are so worried, because he hasn’t written home looking for any money either. My father adds that he lived on very little in his student days, but nobody can live on what Stefan had. The sergeant then tells my mother to sit down as if it’s his house and she is the guest. He explains that the Gardai will do their best to try and locate Stefan, but
there is no reason to be alarmed at this early stage and they don’t want to refer to him as a missing person as yet. The Gardai in the West would be keeping an eye out, he said, and in the meantime, it would be no harm to have a description. So then the Garda with the notepad sits down on a straight-backed chair in order to take down the details.

Everyone tries to remember what Stefan looks like and what he wore when he was leaving. My mother begins to say that Stefan is tall like his father. He’s got a friendly face and brown eyes, like his mother. My father knows what the Gardai are looking for, so he begins to give them a detailed description of Stefan’s rucksack, but then it is clear that he has never described anyone before in words like this and can’t even remember the colour of Stefan’s hair or jacket. They have to call Franz into the room, because he has the best memory in our house and can remember all kinds of dates and things that happened which everybody else wants to forget. He starts by saying that Stefan has thin legs and that he walks very fast, but the sergeant says he wants to confine it to appearances, so then Franz becomes nervous and can only remember that Stefan wore a grey jacket with a hood and blue jeans. The younger Garda says it’s exactly what they were looking for and reads back the description.

‘Tall, slim build, last seen wearing blue jeans and a grey, hooded anorak, carrying a green-and-white rucksack.’ As we listen to these words, it sounds like Stefan will never come back. It’s the description that nobody wants to hear, because it has taken all the life out of him and made him a missing person.

I’m not able to add anything except that Stefan has a mole on his back, but I know that is of no value to
the police. All I can think of while the Gardai are in the house is that I am a criminal. I go through all the crimes I have committed. I listen to them in the hallway and imagine them leading me away to the squad car outside. I can already see the crowd of neighbours gathered on the street watching them drive away and me turning around in the back seat to take one more look at the house where I grew up. I have a recurring dream of this moment and imagine my mother at the door crying, saying she will bring me cake when I’m in prison.

When my mother talks about bringing people back to life, I know she is quietly thinking about Stefan. I think of Stefan out there in the West of Ireland, walking along the small roads in County Clare and Connemara, all the places I’ve been to, thinking that there is always something following him, like a shout in the air. He keeps walking and walking, but he will never get away from his own name, and his own family, and his own country. I think of him looking out at the sea, with nothing but the sound of the wind in his ears. And even though there is nobody around and he’s picked the loneliest place in the world where there is nothing for miles, he can still feel that people are after him. I think of him looking out at the Atlantic as if he’s been hunted like a rabbit and can’t turn back. He’s got no country to go back to.

The Gardai said they would leave it for another week. They told us that they would be keeping an eye out for him in the meantime, but we knew it would be impossible to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found. We thought of him like the fugitive on the television series, always on the move to a new place. People in Ireland had disappeared to places like America and Canada, so they probably understood why somebody would not want to
keep in touch. My mother sat in the front room a lot, thinking it was all her fault. She was wondering about all the things that might have happened to him, making up all kinds of accidents like falling off cliffs or breaking his leg on the side of a mountain and lying there starving and unable to pull himself down to the next village. She was starting the nightmare factory again.

And then I decided I had to tell her that Stefan was trying to be on his own. I wanted to put her mind at rest and told her he wanted to get away from Germany, from his father.

‘He wants to disappear,’ I said to her.

‘What did you say?’

I could see how shocked she was to hear this. She wanted to know exactly what Stefan had said to me.

‘You better be very clear about your answer,’ she said, ‘because this is a matter for the police at this stage.’

I was not sure what I was going to tell the Gardai when they asked me. It was out in the open now. I told her that Stefan said he felt numb in Germany and maybe she felt the same when she came to Ireland.

‘He hasn’t spoken to his father for a long time,’ I told her.

‘He told you that,’ she said.

‘Not for over a year,’ I said. ‘He wants to get as far away from his home as possible and disappear. He wants to go underground.’

My mother was silent for a moment. She was afraid of this German father-and-son war, because she must have heard it all from Tante Käthe. She said she knew there was trouble at home and now she was beginning to worry that Stefan was going to be a danger to himself out there around the Cliffs of Moher somewhere.

‘He doesn’t know the Irish landscape,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the German mountains. Sometimes the wind comes up on those cliffs and picks people off like an invisible hand.’

She said she was constantly surprised by the wind in Ireland. After she got married to my father, he brought her on a honeymoon pilgrimage up to Croagh Patrick and she said she had to bend down and hold on to the rocks, otherwise the wind would have blown her down the mountain again. She was beginning to imagine the worst. She could not understand how Stefan could turn his back like that on his family, on the place where he grew up, on his own home.

‘Will he not get homesick?’ she wanted to know.

But that was exactly what Stefan was trying to be, homesick. He was trying to learn that feeling.

For a while the phone calls kept coming. My mother’s school friend was thinking of coming over to try and set up a search party, but my father said Ireland was far too big a place to start looking for somebody who might not want to be found. My mother was in tears on the phone every day, because at times they thought Stefan was dead already. Onkel Ted came out to say a special Mass. They were only waiting for the day when his body would be found and I can see it in her eyes, how heartbroken Stefan’s mother must be back at home in Germany.

At night our house is very quiet now, like a church where everyone is praying for him to return. Everybody is trying to remember him back to life again.

Then one day my mother was outraged, because she was on the phone to her friend and Käthe asked a question that seemed so thoughtless at this moment. She wanted
to know if my mother had already given Stefan the ancient book from the time of Gutenberg. In other words, if Stefan was carrying the precious book with him. It seemed to my mother that Stefan’s mother didn’t even care about her own son as much as she cared about the valuable book, and if her son didn’t come back, she hoped that at least the book would be returned. My mother could not understand her. She said it was no wonder Stefan had never learned to feel anything.