my older brother, is married and living at home and he’s got a problem with water hammer. She has no idea what water hammer is, so I explain it to her. It’s something my brother has inherited along with the house, it has to do with the old pipes, the old plumbing. Water starts hammering like a hammer due to air locking, if you run water or flush the toilet in two different places in the middle of the night, for example. It can wake up the whole house. It used to drive my father mad. It’s virtually unheard of nowadays, a thing of the past which happens mostly in old houses.
I tell her that my brother has hardly done a thing to the house in the meantime, he’s kept everything the way it was, unchanged. He wants to preserve it all according to his memory. He still has the same problem with mice that my father used to have. My brother’s father is the same as my father, no difference, only that everybody has their own father to deal with. I still believe my father is after me. Even in the hotel sometimes, when I hear a door opening at night, I think he’s coming to get me even though he’s been dead for years and it can’t be him, I checked. It was somebody who got the wrong door. Swedish tourists, I think, who thought I was in their room by mistake. And every time this happens to me, I discover nothing new, only that my father has better things to be doing than following me around for the rest of my life. I’ve been imagining him, that’s all. It’s only now that I know what I’m dealing with.
Liam, stop it, she says.
Also. The yellow door. The door I’ve been afraid of since childhood is not the door of the place where my father brought me when my mother was in hospital and I thought she was never coming back, the yellow door that still gives me the taste of custard at the back of my throat every time I pass by, and it’s not the blue door of the school either, because the colour is irrelevant, so I’m told, it’s not any of those doors but the door of my own home when I was a child that I should be coming to terms with and walking into without fear, whatever colour it was, dark green. A kind of deep green gloss that people had on doors in the past but which is not in use very much any more now.
There was a moment of sadness in the car from time to time that kept us from saying anything. We stopped talking quite suddenly and were silent, back to our own thoughts, looking out the window, arriving outside the gates of the Botanic Garden. As if there were no words left in the world, only the sound of the electronic door sliding back and the sound of traffic and the sound of Manfred getting out the wheelchair. All I could think about was how short the time was and how she would be dead so soon after that. You do your best not to think like this, but you can’t help it. It’s at the forefront of your mind, even when you think you’ve forgotten it and it seems like nothing is going to change, we’re all going to live forever. There were occasions during the trip when she was close to crying and I wanted to cry with her, but I couldn’t let myself. I wish I could. And I’m not sure sadness is the right word for what I felt as Manfred was helping her out of the car, getting her into the wheelchair and she was saying, thanks Manfred, you’re a pet. It was bigger than sadness, I think. Something else, maybe the feeling that things were not quite as sad as they were meant to be, as though I was yet to discover what sadness was about and we had only briefly stepped outside normal time, waiting for real time to catch up again.
To be honest, I had no idea how to be sad. I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was thinking in that kind of situation. What do you say when somebody is dying? What are you meant to talk about? You talk about nothing to do with dying, isn’t that so? You say anything that comes into your head and pretend it’s the furthest thing from your thoughts.
She was not afraid of talking about death and what it does to you. She said it took all the goodness out of life, hearing that it was over. Everything went black, she said. What was the point of it all? What was the point in all that knowledge inside her head coming to nothing? All the people. All the stories she collected. All the books she read. And what about all the good times? Did they all come to nothing as well? Or did they remain good times?
She said it was like a door closing.
She said it was like losing all the lovers she ever had, like losing her friends, losing her brother, like all the doors closing at once, like everybody leaving without a word, only this time it was herself that was leaving, she said.
That’s what you do, Liam, you start saying goodbye. You go back over your life and you say goodbye to everyone, each one individually. You say goodbye to all the people you remember. All the things you had once in your possession, the jar of hand cream, your lipstick, your own thumbprint left in a tube of toothpaste. All the things you had that were never yours for keeps, only borrowed. The yellow curtains, Liam. The books. The shoes. The trace of yourself left behind. All the places you ever set foot in. All the houses you ever lived in, all those quiet rooms, all the fires at night, all the warm beds and the towels on the radiator.
And maybe there in Berlin with her was the first time I became aware of anyone close to me dying. I didn’t say this to her, but when my own father died, I was too much in shock, I had spent so much time trying to get away from him that I was not mentally prepared for it when he disappeared. It felt as if he was only gone out to the garden to light a bonfire and he would be back any minute with the smell of smoke on his clothes asking me what I’d been up to. I felt suddenly very old when my father died. As if my life was gone past. His death was my death, so I thought, even though I obviously had to go on living, I had no option. I was still alive after him, but he might as well have taken me with him, I refused to believe it was him in the coffin. At his funeral I felt he was still fully present. My mother and all our relatives and everyone else in the church were in a different world and my father’s brother, the Jesuit, was up on the altar saying his own brother was gone, the Lord had taken him to rest. I didn’t believe any of those words. I wanted to run away from the church and all the people because they were suffocating me.
I think you need lessons in sadness. I had no idea what grief was at the time. I could see it in other people, but I didn’t realise that I carried it with me all along. It was accumulating without me knowing it, like some dormant virus that can eventually erupt when you’re least expecting it. When I saw my mother crying I could see everything, her whole life, her childhood, her memories, how much she must have been in love and how much she must have been loved, no matter how hard my father was on the family. Whenever people were sad, they showed all their happiness as well. I didn’t think sadness should be revealed in a person, it was a weakness. I was only doing what everybody else was doing at the time, I thought, trying to avoid sadness. I was under the impression that everyone in Ireland was doing their best to pretend there was no such thing as sadness, singing, drinking, talking, telling stories, anything at all to keep themselves from looking sad, only when they were singing sad songs. I kept laughing at myself, laughing at the world, laughing at death, laughing at pain, laughing at things I liked, laughing at love and all those things that could hurt you if they were taken away, laughing at everything that makes you fall victim to sadness. I wanted to let everyone know that I was not afraid of my father dying, I was not bothered by any of that, so I told myself.
When my mother died I was still afraid to be sad. She was alone after my father died because her best friend, my father’s brother, refused to visit her. All I knew how to do was to be her son. But he was her real companion, my father’s brother, the Jesuit in the family. And then he stopped coming to see her. I didn’t know the reason for this at the time. I knew there was a reason, but it’s not something I worked out until much later. She would sit looking out at the back garden and wait for my father’s brother, saying why does he not come and visit me? He was there at her funeral, the Jesuit. My father’s brother. He came to say Mass for her. Although I was hardly present myself. I was there with the family, but I was more or less absent from then on, avoiding everything, shaking hands with my father’s brother outside the church and not saying anything, wishing I was invisible, as if you cannot see your own life clearly when you’re actually in it.
This time I was present.
Travelling around Berlin in the car for two days, pushing the wheelchair in through