We just want to give you a conscience, she says finally.
After that the room is silent for a long time. My father takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes with the upper part of his wrist. Its hard to look at them, sitting together side by side, unable to get away from the past. Maybe thats why people have to pass things on to their children, so they can be freed from it themselves. I feel the weight of all this information in my chest because its the story of my mother being shamed. Its like a blinding solstice entering into my head. I am the boy who was born with his head turned back and I cant stop thinking of my mother, standing in the glare of the sunlight after the war, with nothing to say. I am the son of a German woman who was shamed in front of the world, and the son of an Irishman who is refusing to surrender to the British.
These are things I need to forget, things I dont want to think about any more. I want to have no past behind me, no conscience and no memory. I want to get away from my home and my family and my history.
When Im finally allowed to leave, I walk out the front door into the sunshine. I take my bike and feel the breeze coming in from the sea on my way down to the harbour. I pass by men in overalls painting the blue railings along the seafront. I hear them talking to each other, banging and scraping off the rust. I smell the paint and the cigarettes they smoke, like a new colour in the air. At the harbour, my friend Packer has got me a job working with an old fisherman. Nobody asks where I come from. Its just me and Packer and the other lads working for Dan Turley, sitting on the trellis outside his shed on the pier, listening to the faraway sound of the radio and laughing at our own jokes. Dan Turley lying on his bunk inside the shed with his white cap right down over his eyes and us sitting outside in the sun with the painted signs behind us. Big white lettering on a blue background saying: fresh mackerel, lobster for sale, boats for hire, trips around the island.
People come from all over the place to buy fish and lobster. Some people hire out the boats to go fishing and others go for the pleasure trip. When they come back in, we have to tie up the boat, calculate how many hours theyve been out, take the money and enter it into the book with the stub of a pencil on a string. All the boats have different names, like Sarah Jane and Printemps. Sometimes we have to go up on the rocks at the back of the shed with the binoculars, to make sure none of the boats are in difficulty. Sometimes we have to go out to rescue them when the engine fails. Couples going out to the island to lie around on the grass. Groups of them going out thinking its warm and only realizing when they get out there how breezy it can be. Then you see one of the women coming back shivering, wrapped up in a mans jacket, maybe even pale and seasick because theyre not used to being out on the water. Sometimes its the opposite, when they go out in raincoats and come back all pink and sunburned down one side with half a red face. Sometimes you look out and its raining in one part of the bay while the sun is still shining straight down in another part, like a desk-lamp on the water. Sometimes the sea is rough and nobody can go out at all because the red flag is up. And sometimes people only come to look, men walking their dogs, women wearing sunglasses on top of their heads, nurses from the nursing home overlooking the harbour bringing the old people down in their wheelchairs to stare at the boats.
Its the harbour of forgetting and never looking back.
This summer Im going to escape and earn my own innocence. Its goodbye to the past and goodbye to war and resentment. Its goodbye to the killing news on the radio, goodbye to funerals and goodbye to crying. Its goodbye to flags and countries. Goodbye to the shame and goodbye to the blame and goodbye to the hurt mind.
Two
It looked as if everything had stopped moving. You could feel the boat drifting and hear the water making all kinds of swallowing noises underneath. Everything was rocking, but it looked like we were stuck in the same spot all the time, because the sun was shining again, like a thousand liquid mirrors flashing across the water. Everything was white and blank and you could not even see the land any more, as if the country we came from had disappeared and we now had no country to go back to. You knew where it was, right in front of you. You could imagine the shape of it in your head the hill, the harbour and the church spires. You could hear lots of familiar sounds coming from the shore a motorbike, a train going into the city. There were men drilling on roadworks somewhere, except that it didnt sound like drilling at all to us, more like somebody ringing a small bell. Everything was far away and it was just me and Dan, drifting and jigging the fishing lines up and down, not saying very much to each other, as if there was some sort of fishermans law of silence in the boat. Sooner or later we could see that we were not standing still at all and that the tide had already taken us close to the island. Dan muttered something and we pulled in the lines. The boat bounced across the waves and the spray came over the bow, wetting my bare arms, until we came level with the harbour again and he cut the engine. We threw out the lines and drifted once more, listening to the water giggling underneath, until we hit a shoal of mackerel and the boat was suddenly full of flapping.
Then I heard a shout coming from the shore.
Turley.
His name, nothing more. I looked to see if he had heard it too. Along the top of the rocks there was somebody standing with the advantage of the sun behind him, but we could see nothing and the shout could have come from any of the caves along the coast that looked like open mouths. It could have come from the small stone ruin or from any of the dark windows of a derelict house on the cliff. It was just the one shout, no more. Somebody who knew him. A hostile call that hung in the air over the water and would not go away, as if somebody wanted him to know that he was being watched and that they had not forgotten, thats all.
I know there is no place to hide from your memory and no place to hide from your own name. It will come after you, following you down the street, on the bus, even out in the boat. Your own name following you like a curse. Packer told me that Dan Turley comes from Derry and that hes got enemies, but we dont know much more than that because he never talks about himself. Hes the man who never looks back, the man who wants to forget his own name and where he came from, like me.
My father and mother taught us how to forget and how to remember. My father still makes speeches at the breakfast table and my mother still cuts out pictures and articles from the newspapers to put into her diary when she has time. She wants to make sure that we remember how we grew up and dont repeat what happened to her in Germany. She wants everything to be fixed and glued into her book. Our history and the history of the world all mixed together. There is a lock of blond hair on one page and a picture of Martin Luther King on the next. School reports and pictures of tanks on the streets of Prague facing each other.
Whenever we had nightmares in our family, she would get up in the middle of the night to take out a piece of paper and coloured pencils. Here, draw the nightmare, she would say. Once you put it down on paper, you will never have to dream about it again. So we would sit up in bed with the light on, rubbing our eyes and drawing whatever it was that frightened us. Sometimes I couldnt remember what the nightmare was. My fingers were so weak with sleep that I couldnt even hold the pencil or push it down onto the paper. But she would wait patiently with her arm around me, until the bad thing was drawn and coloured in. Look, she would then say, its there in your drawing and we can put it away. Now we have un-remembered it and we can go back to sleep again.
Our family is a factory of remembering and forgetting. My mothers diary is full of secrets and nightmares. Theres a drawing by my sister Maria of a wolf with green teeth preventing her from getting down to my mother at the bottom of the stairs. Theres a picture of my brother Franz in one window of the house and everybody else in separate windows of the same house, unable to speak to each other or hear each other calling, because each room has a different colour and a different language. Theres a picture of a river coming through the front door with lots of people that we dont know on boats sailing along the hall, speaking English. There were nightmares in Irish and nightmares in German. Nightmares in English that could only be drawn without words. Family nightmares and world nightmares. I once drew the picture of a Jewish man who had his beard ripped off and his chin was all red, because my mother told me that story and I couldnt stop thinking about it. Theres a drawing of Roger Casement being buried in Glasnevin. Another drawing of the Berlin wall and people trying to escape through the windows of their houses, throwing their suitcases and their children down first.
Sometimes we had to draw the nightmare and also the solution. Maria at the bottom of the stairs in my mothers arms, and the wolf locked in the bathroom. My sister Bríd standing at the window getting lots of good blue air into her lungs instead of bad red air. Nightmares about my mother not being in the same country as us. At one time, my drawings were all full of pigs and chickens and farmers facing in one direction. All the smoke and all the flags were flying to the left until one night, when my mother discovered that she was the only person looking the other way, to the right. She told me to turn her around and then everything was fine, with all of us facing in the same direction, all in the same country again.
There were so many nightmares in our house that my mother must have been up all night sometimes. As soon as one bad thing was down on paper, something new would get into our heads. The more we drew our nightmares, the more we made up new ones. There are night drawings of skeletons, snakes, spiders, lions, walls with eyes, doors with teeth, stairs with massive earthquake cracks opening up on our way to bed. We used up every monster there was, my mother says, and there could hardly be any more nightmares left for us, but still we invented more. And downstairs at night, I know my father and mother were busy with their own nightmares. My father in the front room trying to write articles for the papers and thinking of new inventions that would make Ireland a better place. My mother in the kitchen at the back, putting her German secrets into her diary along with ours.