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 for me to belong fully to either of them? The basement part of me has nothing to do with the library part of me. The bar part of me laughs at the basement part. The library part is slow to rub shoulders with the others.
Each part of me has its own silence, like maps overlapping. A different history, a different now, a different here. Different ways of being at home. Each country has its own denial and guilt and not being accepted. I remain loyal to each part of myself and true to none.
On the way home, I have the feeling that I am not fully consenting to the place where I live. The streets are refusing to dry. There is a sticky glaze on the pavement, like walking on a strip of adhesive paper. I am in a place that does not correspond to where I stand. My body has become detached from my thoughts, my feet in Ireland, my head in Germany, my voice left behind in a landscape of shadows in the west.
Back home, Helen smiles with her head tilted to one side as though everything is up close and simultaneously far away. I bring the children to bed. I make up a story for them about a wedding in the lighthouse. The bride wore a necklace of strawberries. I gather up their toys and put the books back in the bookcase, they love nothing better than piling them up in towers to sit on.
The light is left on in the hall. Helen is getting into bed. Her freckled shoulders. Her vertebrae. In the bathroom, the toothbrush falls out of my hand into the sink. I turn away and hold my face. Leaning slowly forward, I go down onto my knees and place my forehead on the floor.
Silence is not emptiness. Its not the absence of matter. It is a solid state, full of love and language and things collected from childhood. A frozen river of emotion. My condition, though it remains undiagnosed until later, must have something to do with this silence.
It breaks out in my teeth. It begins in the front teeth and gradually spreads across the back teeth, the severity of it leaves me unable to say a word. There is no medical explanation. I have been to the dentist a couple of times, but he can find nothing wrong. He took X-rays, tapped each tooth, froze them one by one, he went as far as refilling some of the old cavities, what more can he do?
It goes away. It comes back. There is no pattern. It flares up at random when I am happy and untroubled, in the park with the lovers, at my desk in the basement, back home with everything calm, the children asleep. I curl up on the bathroom floor like a poisoned snail. My eyes fog over. My mouth is full of glass. I lie with my ear against the wood and the shining white toilet bowl rising like the bow of a ship above me. A hissing dribble of toothpaste emerging from the corner of my mouth.
Helens voice comes in around the tiled walls, her hand is pulling at my arm. I shake my head like a horse and get up on my feet.
You have got to stop working in the basement, she says. It makes you sick. She says she will start up a business, a drama school, a theatre, she will open a café, I need to get out of that basement.
We were in Berlin together. The city where I went to escape from my silence. Where I sang in bars at night, songs in the shadow language that nobody understood. I can reconstruct the configuration of streets, the faces in the bakery, the order of train stations. The announcements in my mothers language, as though everyone in Berlin was related to me, a city of cousins. I can hear the train doors closing, crawling through dimly lit stations with border guards and dogs on the platforms, emerging from underground over abandoned city land, the ruins, the sand, a tree growing up through the tracks.
I stood on the platform waiting for her. I was wearing a white shirt that was too big for me. It was passed on to me, along with a second-hand great coat, by the caretaker in the apartment block where I lived. He was a big man. The shirt was so wide and loose fitting, it billowed in the breeze coming along the tracks and gave me the feeling I had stepped into the life of a much larger being. The excitement I experienced at that moment was not my size. My body mass could not hold that amount of joy. The words I had were too small to contain the magnitude of what was happening to me. I was entering an oversized future, with desires and feelings of luck that were far beyond my capacity to understand. My arms, my chest, my open neck, I was in danger of floating away inside a flapping white tent.
Helen arrived with a big belly. She carried a portable radio. Her shoes were painted over with oval handwriting. We made slow progress through the streets, reduced to the speed of an oncoming baby. We sat in the park while she ate a tub of quark, her belly was full of quark.
I brought her to a bar, she looked underage, just out of school. The barman had a knitting needle through his nose. A man with a female voice came in with a Great Dane and bent over for a joke to let the dog sniff his backside. A woman in a sleeveless leather jacket and gashes along her bare arms spoke in a slow voice to Helen, asking her what it was like to be pregnant, how can you sleep?
The city was warm. We spent the summer in a long pause, not doing very much, going to galleries, sitting in cafés, as if we were living inside a photograph waiting to move forward. Every night I stood up in bars wearing my white shirt, singing songs in a lost language. Every morning I got out the almond oil to rub across Helens belly with the windows open and the tree at the centre of the courtyard swaying. Her navel was a pre-historic spiral at the top of a shining dome. We were constantly hungry. She needed tons of cheese and apples and smoked mackerel. The future was expanding inside her, it seemed she could hold it back and stop the world and never have to give birth. Our lives remained in that place of refuge before coming into being. We were in a time before knowledge. The moment before memory. All we could think of was now.
We walked through the streets at night when it was cooler. We passed by posters showing the faces of wanted German terrorists. A woman leaning out the window watched us from above in silence. The street lighting was dim. The buildings were decayed, gaps where houses went missing, the war was not far behind.
We found the viewing platform and I helped Helen up the wooden stairs. We looked across the wall at the open death zone. A stretch of empty ground lit up, guards in a watchtower, houses on the far side like canyons left in darkness. The platform had been erected in a time of handkerchiefs, for people waving to their relatives on the far side, holding up their children, calling out their names. When the people on the other side were prohibited from waving back, the platform no longer had any function other than for visitors coming to have a look over the edge of the world.
Leaning on the rail, looking at the frontier before us, I understood the shock in my mothers eyes when she read about the Berlin Wall being built. The newspapers sent over from Germany by her sisters only confirmed how far away Ireland was, how much apart she was from her family. I grew up with that distance. The wall became part of me. Describing it was like describing myself. A human division which had spread into every corner of the world, into every family, every heart. The wall had yet to come down. The barriers had yet to be opened, people streaming across, their jubilant faces, smiling and crying, crowds on top of the wall hacking. None of this had happened yet, all that freedom was still impossible to imagine, like the sound of a new born baby.
We stared across the Berlin Wall, a kiss, a smile, the dirt of border lighting in Helens face as she turned to me and said lets go back.
Everybody in Dublin is back from somewhere. The pubs are full of returning. They talk about their encounters, drug voyages, bus journeys on death roads. They laugh at mortality. They laugh at life. They laugh at the strangeness of things, the invention of difference, the great mind-altering misunderstanding of the world.
They stand at the bar in Kehoes pub full of books to be written. Stories of heroic distance, cities and characters I could never dream of. One of them was robbed on a train while sleeping in the luggage rack. One of them took a piece of tubing into his nostril, his life came and went, he woke up a week later in the same place, same voices quietly talking around him, same dog lying on the ground in a curl. One of them was left between two countries, rejected at the border to Iraq, refused re-entry to Afghanistan. One of them refused to pay the price of a bottle of whiskey for a bottle of Coke and nearly died drinking the water in a river. Another one was nearly killed in a German car plant, a millisecond away from being pressed into the shape of a car door, his elbow brushed the safety button.
They have come back amazed at what women can do, what men can do, what food can do to you. An actor Helen knew from the theatre in Dublin got shot in New York by his lover, he came back in a wheelchair. A neighbour of mine got lost in Goa and never made it back to his family. A woman Helen knew at school returned from Brazil, her husband ran away with another man, the same in reverse for a man I knew from Galway, his wife went off with his sister.
One of them brought back a story from Morocco. He was in a town called Fez, a narrow street no wider than a hallway. There were three young women wearing headscarves in front of him when a donkey came rushing by with panniers full of olives and boy rider whacking a stick. The donkey was farting on the way through. The girls, the young women in their hijabs, turned around, unable to help themselves. Their hands were up to their mouths, they were in tears holding on to each other, choking, doubled over in the street.
We are back from Berlin with our story.
What have I got to tell? A Nativity scene, with the Berlin Wall in the background. I became an overnight father, we returned to Dublin, Helen breastfed Rosie in the snug, a glass of Guinness for the baby. We got a place to stay, I took up a job in the native basement, we now have a second girl, Essie, our immaculate family.
Back where?
It makes no sense.
Back to where we first met? Back to the first words she spoke to me. Back to where Helen worked in a small theatre, back to the places I brought her on the Aran Islands, she didnt speak the ghost language, she was a visitor, I had to translate my songs for her.
Back home? Back to my country? Back to where I am from where I am only half from, where I have tried to be from, where I have never been from?
Back to where she is not from either?
Helen grew up in England. Her family lived in Birmingham before they double emigrated to Canada and left her behind. She was sent to boarding school in Dublin, still a child. They went to live in a town with a salt mine, by one of the Great Lakes in Ontario. Helen found herself emigrating in reverse, going back to Ireland, a country she didnt know.
She is a piece of Irish soil in her mothers shoes.
On Sunday night, shes on the phone to Canada. She sits by the payphone in the hallway with her back to the wall and her knees up, playing with the cable. I stand in the bedroom listening to her, the children asleep, I have their shoes in my hands, pinched up off the floor. I hear her paraphrasing her life. She describes the ground-floor flat where we live, sectioned off in the hall with two separate entrances. She says its fully furnished, fitted with a pastel-green carpet, nice neighbours upstairs, not far from the sea.
I can hear the questions her mother is asking in Canada by answers Helen gives in Ireland. Everything is enhanced in her voice. Our lives are magnified out of proportion by distance. She converts everything around me into a fabrication. She puts the world into my mouth.
The school, the streets, the people upstairs are very funny, the Alsatian next door is enormous, the shopkeeper is always giving her the wrong change. The furniture auctions next door, the swivel-mirror she bought, the auctioneer took her name, a sticker attached Helen Boyce.
Our surroundings are enlarged to fit the wider spaces of Ontario. Things that remain locally reduced in my head are brought to life with big-sky clarity by Helens enthusiasm over the phone. For over an hour, everything is released from the prejudice of reality, all previously undiscovered. Nothing is valid, nothing is true until it is spoken.
It makes me feel at home, listening to Helen describe nearby things in such a faraway tone. That same excitement with which my mother spoke to her sisters on the phone in Germany. I grew up in this removed story, never quite matching the place where we lived. I once asked my mother where she felt at home and she said it was where the postman delivered her letters. It was the letters coming from Germany that brought her home. Helen is the same, sending back the news, rerouting our lives to a place on the far side of the world.
I hear her telling her mother in Canada that we are settled down now. She says I have a good job in the music business. I am responsible for signing up new talent. She says she has a part time position teaching drama at her former boarding school. She has begun to teach yoga classes, we keep the front room clear of furniture. She says my brother is a good carpenter, my sister Gabriela gave us a porcelain teapot. I have a little brother who works in a bicycle shop nearby. My sisters sometimes come to look after the children.
We are living on the main street. On the bus route, same side as the veterinary surgery and a grocery shop, further down a pub on the corner. The house next door has been turned into a guest house. A white, double-fronted building with a terracotta path running up the middle and patches of lawn on either side, each with a cluster of palm trees at the centre. The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. They are not real palms. A non-native variety pretending to be palm trees. They manage to grow well in the mild climate, up to the height of the first-floor windows. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.
The people upstairs are laughing again. They make me conscious of my life downstairs. I pull the curtains. I put the books back. I check to make sure the girls are asleep. I lay out their clothes for school in the morning. It all seems to give the people upstairs more to laugh at. They laugh until it comes to the point where I cant help laughing myself. And as soon as I laugh, they go silent. I find myself laughing alone. I hear them putting on music. They always play the same track, which becomes a problem after a while only because I like the song myself. Whenever I want to play it, they get there ahead of me. The song I love becomes my enemy.
I hear Helens footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. I can see the shape of her body in the sound of her shoes. Her straight back, her arms have no weight in them, she has long hair, apple breasts. I hear the silence as she moves to the carpet for a moment and returns to the tiles.