My father stands up and goes over to put his arm around her shoulder. I can hear his voice shaking as he speaks.
‘They shamed her,’ he says.
My mother is smiling now, trying to say that she’s lucky to be alive and it could have been much worse, like what happened to women in the east who were killed by the Germans, women who had all their dignity taken away from them, women who went to their death along with their children. Women who sang songs to their children at the last minute to make them less worried before they died in the concentration camps.
‘The Germans shamed themselves,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget that.’
But my father will not let it go. He is angry and sad at the same time. I can see his chin quivering. He speaks as if my mother has become part of Irish history now. He admires her for refusing to undress for the British and says she has the rebel heart. He wishes he could have been there to defend her, but it’s too late and too long ago and there’s nothing he can do about it any more except not to allow anything British under his roof. All he can do is stop English words coming into our house and drive everything British out of Ireland. He is still trying to protect her from this humiliation and wants me to remember that my mother’s family had been against the Nazis all along. Her uncle lost his job as Lord Mayor for not joining the party. Her sister Marianne turned her guest house in Salzburg into a safe haven during the war, hiding a Jewish woman who went around dressed as a Catholic nun. My mother disobeyed orders so that she could bring food to Salzburg and was arrested as a deserter, then sent to the east in a locked train carriage with a young boy soldier who was chained to the seat.
‘The British have no right to pass judgment on anyone,’ he says. There are other things to remember as well, things to do with Irish history, things that are still going on in Northern Ireland. He takes my mother’s hand. He has tears in his eyes and he can hardly speak any more.
‘They should look into their own hearts,’ he says.
My mother smiles and says it’s time to walk away from the hurt. It’s the time of forgiveness and peace. It’s time to imagine the dead people back to life again in our memory. It’s time to grow up and become innocent.
‘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. It’s hard to look at them, sitting together side by side, unable to get away from the past. Maybe that’s 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 it’s the story of my mother being shamed. It’s like a blinding solstice entering into my head. I am the boy who was born with his head turned back and I can’t 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 don’t 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 I’m 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. It’s 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 they’ve 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 it’s 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 man’s jacket, maybe even pale and seasick because they’re not used to being out on the water. Sometimes it’s 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 it’s 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.
It’s the harbour of forgetting and never looking back.
This summer I’m going to escape and earn my own innocence. It’s goodbye to the past and goodbye to war and resentment. It’s goodbye to the killing news on the radio, goodbye to funerals and goodbye to crying. It’s 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 didn’t 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 fisherman’s 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.