Youll have no more strangers in your house, please God, he said.
The Garda showed his teeth to my mother and called her Madam. The workers called her Maam. We called her Mutti or Ma Ma and my father is called Vati even though hes from Cork. The Garda had a moustache and said it was no fox we had in the kitchen but a rat the size of a fox. And the rat was very glic, he said, because he hid behind the boiler and would not come out until he was chased out with fire and smoke.
There are other people living at the top of our house, all the way up the stairs, further than you can count. Theyre called the ONeills and they never take their hats off, because they think the hallway is like the street, my mother says. They are very noisy and my father makes a face. He goes up to speak to them and when he comes down again he says he wants the ONeills out of the house. There will be no more chopping wood under this roof.
Áine came to look after us when my mother had to go away to the hospital. Shes from Connemara and has different words, not the same as the workers, or the ONeills, or the Garda, or my mother. She teaches us to count the stairs again in Irish: a haon, a dó, a trí She doesnt lay out the clothes at night or tell stories. She doesnt call me Hanni or Johannes, she calls me Seán instead, or sometimes Jack, but my father says thats wrong. I should never let anyone call me Jack or John, because thats not who I am. My father changed his name to Irish. So when I grow up Ill change my name, too.
Áine cant speak my mothers words, but she can speak the words of the Garda. She brings us for a walk along the seafront and shows us the crabs running sideways and the dog barking for nothing all day. She says she wants to go to London, but its very far away. And Connemara is far away, too. I said London was far away one, and Connemara was far away two, and she said: Yes. She sits for a long time looking out across the sea to London. Then she takes us up to the shops to buy sweets and I get more than Franz because Im very glic. She teaches us how to walk on the wall, all the way back along the seafront, and Franz makes up a song about it: Walk on the wall, walk on the wall
My mother came back with a baby called Maria, so thats Franz, Johannes and Maria: Eins, Zwei, Drei. We speak German again and my mother shows us how to feed the baby with her breast. Maria opens her mouth and shakes her head and then my mother has to change her nappy because the baby did A A. After that, my mother puts Maria out in the garden with a net across the pram to stop the birds from stealing her dreams.
Áine took us down to the sea again because Franz had a fishing net and he was going to catch one of the crabs, but they were too fast. I said they were all two fast and three fast, and Áine said: Yes. She took out a box with a small mirror and put lipstick on her lips. She took off her shoes to put her feet into one of the pools with the crabs. I started throwing stones into the pools. Franz got all wet and Áine said A A in Irish. Then I threw a stone in Áines pool. She chased after me and on the way home she would not let me walk on the wall, so I tried to walk sideways, like the crabs.
My mother knows everything. She knows that I was throwing stones, but Áine said it wasnt half as bad as that, which is the same as what my mother says only in different words: Halb so schlimm. My mother wagged her finger and said: Junge, Junge, which is the same as what Áine says in English: Boy, oh boy, and in Irish a mhac ó.
That evening, my mother brought us up to the station to collect my father from the train. She picked us up to look over the wall at the tracks. We waved and shouted at the train rushing through under the bridge and then we started running towards my father coming out of the station. My father is different to other men. He has no moustache, but he has glasses and he has a limp, too. He swings his briefcase and his leg goes down on one side as if the ground is soft under one foot. Its the same as when you walk with one foot on and one foot off the pavement. My mother kisses him and puts her arm around him. He looks into the pram at Maria to see if she has her eyes open. Franz tries to carry the briefcase and I try to walk like my father, but thats not allowed. He hits me on the back of my head and my mother kneels down to say its not right to imitate people. You always have to walk like yourself, not like your father or the crabs, just like yourself. At home, my father was still angry. He wanted to know why I was throwing stones at the pools so I told him that Áine said A A in Irish. I mixed up the words like sand and cement and water. I used Áines words and told my father that she said A A, what the baby did, in my mothers words.
What did you throw? my father asked.
Stones.
I saw myself twice in his glasses and he made a face, just like when the ONeills were chopping wood upstairs.
Stones, he said again, very loud. Then he stood up.
My mother was laughing and laughing until the tears came into her eyes. She said it was so funny to hear so many words and so many countries being mixed up.
Stones, my father said again. I wont have this.
Its not half as bad as that, my mother said, still wiping her eyes.
Shes here to speak Irish to them, my father shouted, and then my mother tried to stop him going up to speak to Áine. She was holding on to his arm and saying: Leave it till the morning. Let me talk to her.
My father says there will be no more chopping wood and no more speaking English under his roof. I stay awake and look at the light under the door. At night, I hear my mother and father talking for a long time. I hear the ONeills coming up the stairs and I hear my father coming out on the landing to see if they will start chopping wood. Then the light goes out. I hear water whispering. I hear a fox laughing. I hear stones dropping into the pools and I hear sand and cement being mixed with a shovel. Then its silent and nobody is listening, only me.
My mother spoke to Áine the next day. Shes not able to speak Áines words. So in the words of the Garda and the workers, my mother tells her never to speak the words of the Garda and the workers to us again.
You must try to speak to them in Irish, my mother said.
What good is that to them? Áine said.
Please. Its my husbands wish.
So we have to be careful in our house and think before we speak. We cant speak the words of the Garda or the workers, thats English. We speak Áines words from Connemara, thats Irish, or my mothers words, thats German. I cant talk to Áine in German and I cant talk to my mother in Irish, because shell only laugh and tickle me. I can talk to my father in German or Irish and he can speak to the Garda and the workers for us. Outside, you have to be careful, too, because you cant buy an ice pop in German or in Irish, and lots of people only know the words of the Garda and the workers. My father says they better hurry up and learn Irish fast because we wont buy anything more in English.
Sometimes Áine speaks to herself in the mirror. Sometimes when the ONeills go through the hall on their way out the front door, my mother says good morning to them, but they say nothing at all and just walk out as if they dont understand their own language. Sometimes the man in the fish shop says guten Morgen as if hes forgotten his own language. Sometimes people whisper. Sometimes they spell out the letters of a word. And sometimes people try to forget their own language altogether and Áine continues to say stones as if theres no word in her own language for it.
Stone mór and stone beag, she says. Big stone and little stone.
On Saturday, Áine goes into the city on the bus to speak English. The ONeills were gone away, too, and my father was in the garden digging. He said he was going to get rid of the mountain the workers left behind and grow flowers and radishes, so I watched him as he jabbed the spade into the soil and then pushed it down with his foot. The worms living in the mountain had to go away in the wheelbarrow. My father emptied it and spread out the soil in another part of the garden. Then he let me hold the wheelbarrow while it was filling up again.
Franz made a wall with a line of bricks and he was walking on it singing: Walk on the wall, walk on the wall My father stopped digging and told him to stop. He made the ONeill face again. But Franz kept on saying walk on the wall because that was his song and he couldnt forget it. Then my father jabbed the spade into the mountain and it stayed there, standing up on its own while he went over to Franz and hit him. He hit him on the back of the head so that Franz fell off the wall and his face went down on the bricks. When he got up, there was blood all around his nose and mouth, like the fox. He opened his mouth and said nothing for a long time, as if he had forgotten how to use his voice and I thought he was going to be dead. Then he started crying at last and my father took him by the hand very quickly and brought him inside.
Mein armer Schatz, my mother kept saying as she sat him up beside the sink and started cleaning the blood away from his face. Franz kept crying and trying to say something but he didnt know what words to use. Then my mother turned around to my father and looked at him as if she could not believe her eyes.
His nose is broken, she said.
There were drops of blood on the kitchen floor. They made a trail all the way out into the garden. My father said he was very sorry, but the rules had to be obeyed. He said Franz was speaking English again and that had to stop. Then my mother and father had no language at all. My father went outside again and my mother brought Franz upstairs. Even when the blood stopped, he was still crying for a long time and my mother was afraid that he would never start talking again. She sat down on the bed and put her arm around the two of us and told us what happened when she was in Germany in a very bad film. She held us both very hard and I thought my bones would crack. She was crying and her shoulders were shaking. She said she was going to go back to Germany. She would take us with her. She started packing her suitcase, wondering what she should bring and what she should leave behind in Ireland.
I looked out the window and watched my father fill the wheelbarrow and bring it to another part of the garden, empty it and bring it back to start again. I watched him digging and digging, until the mountain was gone. I wanted to go down and tell him that my mother fixed Franzs nose with a story. I wanted to tell him that I would never say walk on the wall as long as I lived. I wanted to tell him that my mother was going home and she was going to take us with her. But he never looked up and he didnt see me waving. Instead, he made a big fire in the garden and the smoke went across the walls, away over the other gardens, all around the houses and out on to the street. He kept stacking on more and more weeds and leaves with a big fork, as if he wanted to send a message around the whole world with smoke. The fire crackled and whistled, and it smelled like cigarettes. My father was standing with the fork in his hand and sometimes he disappeared. Sometimes the whole house disappeared and people must have thought we were never coming back.
My mother carried Maria in one arm and the suitcase in the other. In the hallway, she put the suitcase down so that she could open the front door and escape on to the street. I knew that my father would be searching for us all over the place in the smoke. But my mother said we were not going to be trapped again. She picked up the suitcase and told us to follow her, but then I heard my father coming in from the garden. His footsteps came all the way as if he was counting the drops of blood on the ground. We tried to run away fast, but it was too late because he was already standing right behind us. I could smell the smoke on his clothes. He asked my mother where she was thinking of going to without any money. He said there was nothing left in Germany and she had nowhere to go home to with three children. He closed the front door and said she was married now, so she sat down on the suitcase and cried.
Shes just a bit homesick, thats all, my father said. He smiled and said he would put on some German music. He kissed my mothers hand and carried the suitcase back up the stairs.
Then the big music filled the whole house. It went into every room and all the way up the stairs. Outside, the fire kept going until it got dark and I stood at the window of the bedroom again with my mother, saying goodbye smoke, goodbye birds, goodbye trees. But we didnt go anywhere. We stayed in Ireland and my mother told us to get into bed: Eins, Zwei, Drei.
Five
My fathers name is Jack and hes in a song, a long ballad with lots of verses about leaving Ireland and emigrating. The song is so long that you couldnt even sing it all in one day. It has more than a thousand verses, all about freedom and dying of hunger and going away to some other land at the end of it all. My father is not much good at singing, but he keeps repeating the chorus about how we should live in Ireland and be Irish.
No more shall we roam from our own native home, is what he says when were standing at the seafront, holding on to the blue railings, looking out at the white sailing boats. He doesnt want us to live in England or America where they speak only English and keep dreaming about going back home. So we stay in Ireland where we were born, with the sea between us and all the other countries, with the church bell ringing and the mailboat going out across the water. Instead of always going away, my father had a new idea. Why not bring people from somewhere else over to Ireland? So thats why he married my mother and now shes the one who does all the dreaming and singing about being far away from home. Its my mother who left her own native shores, and that means we still end up living in a foreign country because were the children from somewhere else.
My father comes from a small town in west Cork called Leap and he had lots of uncles and cousins who had to emigrate. One of his uncles only sent his first letter back from America after twenty years, just to tell everybody that the rumours still going around in Ireland about a girl he left behind with a baby were not true. It was easy to say what you liked about people who went away. And it was easy for those who left to deny Ireland, to look back and say it was full of poverty and failure. Maybe they made a lot of money abroad, my father says, but they were lonely and they wanted everybody who was left in Ireland to come and join them over there. My father and his younger brother Ted were going to emigrate, too. They lived in a house at the end of the town with their mother and a picture of a sailor over the mantelpiece. They had plans to go to America to work with their uncle, but then they got a scholarship and went to school instead.
The town is called Leap after a famous Irishman by the name of ODonovan who once got away from the British by leaping across a nearby gorge. Léim Uí Dhonabháin: ODonovans Leap, they call it. The peelers chased him all over the countryside, but he escaped over the impossible gorge and they were afraid to follow him. Beyond the Leap, beyond the law is what the people of the town said. There was no freedom at that time. The whole town could hardly jump across the gorge after him, so they stayed behind where they were, under the British. They talked about it and went up there for a walk on summer days to look across to the far side. But nobody could do it. So the town was called after something that might as well not have happened at all. It was called Leap because thats what the people in the town wished they had done, what they dreamed about and sang songs about.