work in one of those buildings, in the basement. My day is spent underground. From my desk, I see the feet of pedestrians passing by through a small window above my head. The neon lights are left on all day, even when the sun is shining outside in the street. I am a young man with a full beard and curls in my hair, open expression, quick to smile. I am content in the basement, only that I have contracted some strange, unidentified condition. A virus, a fungus, some parasite must have entered my veins. My face is drawn. My skin is translucent. My teeth feel like glass. I am overwhelmed by fatigue and sleep at my desk. I wake up with underground eyes.
The organisation I work for has been set up to preserve a minority language. Normally referred to as the native language. Some people call it the dead language. It is not spoken on the street, only written in the shadow script above the street names. My work is carried out entirely in this ghost language – Gaelic, Irish.
I run the vinyl record department.
We have a unique collection of native singers. It is my job to collect them from the train station. I bring them for something to eat in a hotel where people from the country gather and recognise each other, a drink before going to the recording studios. They are self-conscious when the red light comes on, the shallow acoustics, the mute face of the recording engineer behind glass staring as if they come from another continent. They get startled by the sound of their own voices played back around the sound-panelled walls. One of them tried out the headphones and said it turned him into a different man, his voice was never the same again.
Some of them go missing. I had to search the entire city for a man who disappeared with a nurse not even half his age, when I found him she was putting on her blue trainee uniform and he stood naked in front of me only for his tweed cap and his fists up. Some of them need to be held by the hand while they sing. Some are equally good at American country music, they will start with a nasal hum at the back of the throat and deviate into the Wichita Lineman. Some of them refuse to travel, we go to record them in their own kitchens. I once had to deliver payment to a singer who would not accept a cheque and insisted on being paid in person. In a village in Connemara where the ghost language is still widely spoken, I met him in a bar with cash. He wouldn’t touch the money, his hands were enormous, a pint of Guinness was no more than a thimble in his fingers, it took three days until he was fully paid.
Our most popular album was recorded live in a Dublin theatre where the audience can be heard yelping with excitement in the background. There is a sense that our moment has come, our music is raw, straight from the earth. It gives me the feeling of being carried back in time. We belong to a country with less roads, less lawnmowers, a place with more wild bees nesting in the grass banks.
One day I arrived at work to find everyone standing in the hallway crying. The commander of the organisation lay at the foot of the stairs, his face gone cold. His naked head was resting on the first step. His right arm was laid out as though he had been giving a speech when he fell. His shoes were off, his socks were yellow, a diagonal design along the side, as though he played golf. Which he never did, nothing further from his mind. The socks merely brought home how normal and integrated we could be while being so devoted to the restoration of a great treasure from the past.
We spoke in low voices, praising his wisdom, his vision, his words had the power to infuse us with emotion. When the ambulance arrived, he opened his eyes. He waved the paramedics away and tried to stand up, resuming his speech where he left off. Entirely in character with the language we worked so hard at reviving, the commander was brought back to life by the sound of a teacup and carried up the stairs to his office. The floor was strewn with newspaper cuttings, some empty bottles, the desk lamp was still on, covered with a garment that was beginning to burn. His secretary appeared and helped to lay him out, she rolled her cardigan up into a cushion. We arranged his tie over his eyes to shield him from daylight.
It’s a happy place to work. Being part of this marginal community in the heart of the city gives me a sense of place. Something glorious about a culture under threat. Hearing the endangered language around me brings back a recurring memory of going out to the islands. Leaning against the rusted white frame of the ferry boat with the engine throbbing in my shoulder. Quiet places with sunlight coming through stone walls, patches of green and blue, gannets diving, waves bashing into the cliffs. Everything in my work is devoted to a silence in the landscape, to what is receding, what is being kept alive.
When it’s time to go home, I tidy my desk and switch off the lights. The remaining daylight seeps in through the high window across the ghost faces along the walls. The basement returns to its forgotten peace. On the way out, the receptionist smiles. She is the niece of an author who wrote a novel in the native language about dead people arguing in a graveyard. I can no longer hide the fact that I am partly dead myself. Half alive. Perhaps undead. As dead as a dead language refusing to die.
I make my way across to the German library. It is situated on the other side of the square in a building that is identical in every way to the one where I work in the basement, same façade, same ratio of windows overlooking the park of lovers, same door, only painted red.
As soon as I step inside I have the illusion of being at home, seeing German newspapers and magazines displayed on tables in the front room. Going up the stairs to the library on the first floor is like going to my bedroom as a child, finding the latest acquisitions propped up in a row on the marble mantelpiece as though it’s my birthday. They have the heating full on. I spend an hour there with my jacket off, a stack of books beside me, until the librarian politely tells me it’s time to go.
The books I borrow give me a fictional character. I see myself being invented in everything I read. I am a boy unable to grow up. I spend weeks in a sanatorium. I take on the anxieties of a goalkeeper. I read about a journalist going undercover, doing dirty and dangerous jobs, washing out metal tanks with acid to demonstrate what it was like to be a migrant worker in Germany. I read the story of a writer who buys himself a new suit for a prize-winning ceremony – after accepting the literary award he brings the suit back to the tailor because it no longer fits him. And the story of the adult child who escapes from a cellar and stumbles onto the streets of Nuremberg without language, gradually claiming back the power of speech.
I grew up in a language nightmare. Between German, Irish and English. I could never be sure what country I was in. My mother was German, my father was Irish. She came to Ireland to learn English but ended up teaching my father German. He refused to speak English, she never learned Irish. At home, we spoke her language, we went to school in the ghost language, my father was a revolutionary who prohibited us from speaking English. It had the effect of turning all language into a fight, a fortress, a place of hiding. It felt like emigrating every time I went out the front door. On the street, I had to look over my shoulder to see what words I could be at home in.
The native language is referred to as – the tongue, our mouth, tongue and country, our famine mouth, the place we come from and the people gone away and the story that cannot be told in any other language.
German is the language of looking back and digging deep and starting again, the language of people who love Ireland more than their own country and sit for hours staring at the full moon over the Atlantic.
English is the language of the street, the language of rule, victory, valour, the language of rock and roll and Shakespeare and James Joyce, the language of freedom and fucking off and never looking back.
This war of languages has left me with a deep silence. I doubt the ground I walk on. I make my way around the city as though I have only recently arrived. Still arriving. Never arriving. My viewpoint is unstable, seen from multiple places at once. Everything is in contradiction, the words are full of blasphemy, I hear the grinding of translation in my head.
Does it have to do with the maritime pressure? The humidity, the cold breeze under my shirt, the empty streets with the veil of rain under the lights? Does it have something to do with shifting from the cold basement of one building to the overheated first floor of another and straight into a noisy ground-floor bar around the corner? The creaking floorboards underneath the carpet. The sound of bottles and fizz, people laughing. Something about switching between these different levels that makes it impossible