by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.
A lot of the women in Düsseldorf looked elegant and provocative, she said. The style was to show how perfectly rounded your backside could be. They wore tight dresses that turned the bottom into a walking globe, spherical cushions in bright colours and stripes. She laughed and sang the line of a pop song from the time, about a woman walking down the street with her round bottom swinging and all the monkey men turning around to look at her.
Walking back home, the granite bite in my mouth slowly began to let go. Nothing, to my mind, can be as intoxicating as the grip of denial being released. The enormous energy that goes into refusing the past comes flooding back in a wave of peace once I face up to it. It is not possible to choose my history. I cannot favour one part over another.
They were all asleep when I got back. I made sure the children were covered. Helen woke up, there was a sleep cloud of warm air around her neck. I whispered to let her know I was going to stay up and listen to some music. I had borrowed a set of headphones from work. I put on one of the albums from the basement catalogue. The accordion player from Galway with a cigarette in his mouth gone to America, a jig called the Rambling Pitchfork. Three, four times in a row I played it.
The Rambling Pitchfork.
The country is full of black flags. We see them hanging from the windows, attached to lamp posts, on the goalposts in sporting fields. Black flags tied to the gates of a car park, on the back of a delivery truck, on bridges over the dual carriageway. Some of the flags are tattered, made of material that doesn’t last. Some of them no more than black refuse bags, stuck to the branch of a tree in the wind.
The black flags make it impossible to ignore what is going on in the north of Ireland. They are there to remind everyone of people on hunger strike. Hunger has a deep meaning in our country. In some places, the flags are accompanied by the faces and the names of the men on their fast along with the name of the camp in which they have been imprisoned. They look thin and gaunt, their hair long, their eyes sunken, one of them had been elected to parliament in London while in prison, his face bore a smile from an earlier time.
There was a letter published in the paper, sent by the mother of one of the hunger strikers to the prime minister in London. It was requesting a meeting to explain why her son was refusing food and water. It described what it was like for a mother to see her child slowly dying. The prime minster was a mother herself, she wore a blue scarf around her neck, but her response to the mother of the hunger striker was unequivocal, she saw no need for compassion, a crime was a crime. The men on hunger strike could not be regarded as political prisoners. They were asking for too much, a letter a week, one visit a week, the right not to wear prison clothing.
On Saturday morning, I drove into the city. I circled around the square to show Rosie and Essie the basement where I worked. I pointed out the park where I had my lunch every day, the corner shop that sold two slices of brown bread and cheese, the German library with the red door. The building beside the German library used to belong to the British Embassy, but it was burned down after a massacre in which civilians were shot dead by British soldiers on the streets of Derry, now it was a solicitor’s office. We parked by the National Gallery, they giggled at the painting of nude women in the countryside. Afterwards, we went to the café with stained glass, we had our own sandwiches. We bought two cherry buns, gone pink inside, but we had to leave them behind unfinished because Rosie got sick.
We should have brought the bowl, Helen said.
We had a stainless-steel bowl at home which was used whenever they were sick. It was also used for baking and washing lettuce and other things like soaking beans and chick peas. From time to time, Rosie and Essie wanted it for playing with water, a doll’s bath, teddies dripping and shrunken. It was a bowl that could be used for many things in the family, though we generally called it the sick bowl. It was dented in a couple of places and had the sound of a bell.
Get the sick bowl.
I grew up alert. Listening like a soldier in perpetual war. When I heard the voice of a child, I woke up running, a hundred doors opening, my bare feet along the green carpet, bursting into the bedroom holding the bowl in one hand, Rosie too weak to stand, waking up from a sick dream. Her forehead wet. Her face white. My other hand keeping back her hair, rubbing her tummy – you’re OK, it’s all out now, all gone. Helen coming with a warm facecloth, then everything was fine again, they eventually went to sleep again as if nothing had happened.
Next day, the sick bowl was back in the kitchen. The sound of water rinsing it clean was a swirling echo of sickness. The bowl was like a steel stomach throwing up a dizzy gush of bubbled hot water. Dried and stainless again. The warped faces of children laughing, reflected from inside the bowl, used briefly to send messages to other civilisations in a distant universe. Then the bowl was ready to be used once more to make a chocolate sponge. Everything looping in a cycle of cakes and steeping lentils and nauseous bell sounds.
Was it some illness I brought with me from the house where I grew up? The country my mother came from, the country my father invented in his head. Something in my overlapping history that I am passing on to my children?
My memory is full of sickness. My father bursting into the room with the sick bowl. Bursting in with medicine. Bursting in with a hot poultice. Bursting in to accuse me of speaking the language of the street inside my head. Bursting in to let me know that innocent people had been shot down on the streets of Derry. Bursting in to tell me the British Embassy was on fire. Bursting in the following day with his beekeeping gear over his head, climbing out the window of my bedroom onto the flat roof wearing big gloves and the smoke of burning sackcloth coming from the nozzle of his bee calmer. Bursting in that same night again with his fists in my sleep after I climbed back in late through the window past the beehives, my mother begging him to stop, the whole family awake on the landing and my brother appearing at the door like a boy adult with one single word – peace. My father finally brought to his senses, his fists turned back into hands, my mother led him away and my eyes got used to the light on.
My father bursting in to apologise with a book, with a box of oil paints, with a small fact about helium he thought I might be interested in and might get us talking. The reconciliation music coming from the front room, Tristan and Isolde, their love death rising and rising up the stairs.
And my little sister, Lotte.
My mother has asked Helen to teach Lotte how to read and write in English. They are doing Tolstoy, a page a day. Lotte fell behind as a child because of her asthma, the language of the street was forbidden in our house, she missed a lot of classes at school. Helen is a good teacher, she waits for Lotte to catch her breath after each sentence.
I remember lying awake hearing Lotte trying to breathe, unable to say a word. Her hair was soaked with sweat, my mother wiped her forehead. The doctor came late one night. We heard his deep voice in the hall, he gave Lotte a Valium injection. She fell asleep and I thought she would never breathe again. Next time the doctor was called, he said it was all in her mind, nothing more than a psychological impediment preventing her from breathing normally like every other child on the street. I heard my father coming up the stairs, bursting into Lotte’s room. He slapped her and told her to go to sleep – you’re making this up. My mother tried to calm him, but he continued shouting, commanding Lotte to start breathing properly. She was quiet after that. But worse again the next day. My father prayed and got his brother the Jesuit to make the sign of the cross over her. He ordered the latest medical journals. Cortisone was known to restrict bone growth in a child. He gave Lotte a glass of liquid yeast instead. He gave her goat’s milk. The cat disappeared. He put on Bach. He read about bronchodilator medication, he discovered an inhaler called Ventolin.
If only it was possible to understand his vision, the mixed family enterprise he created. If only it had not been so obscured by his rage, his love, the silence he cast over the family