The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton

have to pick them out one by one. My mother looked new because she had new clothes. She was smiling all the time and had new perfume on. She brought home a pewter plate and candlestick that was left over from her father and mother’s house. She had pictures of the house and said we would all go there one day. My father and mother drank wine and there was big German music all around the house, maybe outside the house, too, and all the way down to the end of the street.

      Sometimes my mother turns around suddenly to take us all into her arms so that my face is squashed up against Franz and Maria. Sometimes she wants to take a bite out of Maria’s arm, just a little bite. Sometimes she still has tears in her eyes, either because she’s so happy or because she is still sad for Onkel Gerd. He was a good man who spoke very little, only when he had something to say. It was the biggest funeral she had ever seen in Kempen, because he was a lord mayor once and he would not join the fist people. He was not afraid to resist. She hung a photograph of him in the living room so that we could see him and be like him.

      My mother also brought back a typewriter and some days later she opened it up and allowed me to type my name. Johannes. The letters fly out and hit the page. Lettetet. Lettetet. Sometimes two letters get stuck in mid-air and my mother says we have to be more gentle, only one at a time. She holds my finger and helps me to pick out the letter. I press down on the key and the letter shoots out so fast that you can hardly see it. It slaps against the paper like magic. I want to write ‘Johannes is the best boy in the world’, but it would take too long. Then I ask her if I can write ‘Johannes is the boldest boy in the world’ instead and my mother laughs out loud. She says I’m the best boy and the boldest boy at the same time, because I get the most amount of slaps from my father and the most amount of hugs from her to make up for it. Then Franz wants to write down that he will never have to emigrate and go to the yellow house again but it’s too late and we have to go to bed now.

      At night, I can hear my mother downstairs in the kitchen with the typewriter. She’s lettetetting on her own, while my father is in the front room reading. The letters fly out and hit the page faster than you can speak. She’s lettetetting and lettetetting because there’s a story that she can’t tell anyone, not even my father. You can’t be afraid of silence, she says. And stories that you have to write down are different to stories that you tell people out loud, because they’re harder to explain and you have to wait for the right moment. The only thing she can do is to write them down on paper for us to read later on.

      ‘To my children,’ she writes. ‘One day, when you’re old enough, you will understand what happened to me, how I got trapped in Germany and couldn’t help myself. I want to tell you about the time when I was afraid, when I stood in my room and couldn’t shout for help and heard the footsteps of a man named Stiegler coming up the stairs.’