Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People - A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

Ta Maria heard things at the Café Kranz on the Burgring. She went around there for coffee every afternoon because it was the place to hear what people were saying around the town, what they whispered, what you did not hear on the radio. Everybody said it was best to go along with things for the moment, see what happened. It wasn’t all that serious anyway, because they were joking and giving the BDM funny new names in secret. Instead of calling it the League of German Girls, everybody was now calling it Bund deutscher Matratzen — the League of German Mattresses. My mother says her father would have laughed at that.

Onkel Gerd called them all into the living room and asked them to sit down. He waited for a long time, quietly picking out his words before he slowly looked around at each of them individually and told them they had to decide for themselves. He was always calm. He didn’t trust things that were said with emotion, the way they spoke on the radio. Instead, he spoke slowly in clear sentences, breathing quietly and hardly moving his head, like a father. He said it was all right for him to make a sacrifice, but he would not force it on them. He said you have an instinct and you have an intellect and if you had to join the BDM meetings by law, then maybe there was another way out. Sometimes it’s good to tiptoe around things to avoid trouble.

‘The silent negative,’ he said. ‘We will use the silent negative.’

On Sunday the Buttermarkt square was full of colour. There were flags everywhere, flying above the trees and hanging from all the windows around the square. There were standing columns, too, with eagle wings. Loudspeakers had been broadcasting speeches and marching music all morning, and a massive portrait of the Führer had been put up outside the brown house. My mother says she looked up and saw a long red flag with the black swastika on a white circle hanging from the window where her mother once played the piano and where her father said goodbye to himself in the mirror. Sometimes, she says, you have to bite your lip and not allow yourself to be hurt.

Onkel Gerd said it was only a matter of time before somebody took it into his head to play God. The BDM meeting had been arranged to coincide with Mass, so that the girls in Kempen would turn away from the church, so they would belong to the state instead, like a big family. My mother insisted on getting up for early Mass. She could hear the loudspeakers on the square as if they wanted to drown out the prayers inside. And when she arrived late on the square with her missal under her arm, the BDM leader was already foaming at the mouth. She told the Kempen girls they would never need Mass or missals, or candles or head scarves or Corpus Christi processions any more, because now they would be devoted to the Führer. One day, the men in brown broke into the convent school in Mühlhausen smashing everything up and painting swastikas on the walls of the classrooms. And not long after that, they closed the convent down altogether so the nuns had to disappear, too.

The leaves of the missal are not like any other book, they are soft and thin, easy to bend and easy to turn without the slightest bit of noise in church. But outside at the big BDM assembly on the square, my mother says they made a big noise that nobody could ignore. All the girls had to raise their right arms in salute. So when my mother raised her arm, the missal fell down on the cobbles with a clack. It opened up and the breeze rustled the pages so they could be heard all around the square, maybe even all around the town. She bent down and picked it up. She dusted off the covers and then finally raised her arm in the air towards the portrait of the Führer over the Rathaus. The entire square was suddenly tilted at an angle, like a tilted painting, like the dizzy way you can see things when you bend down to look back through your legs. It was time to be obedient, time to swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer, time for the silent negative.

‘I sweat under oath that I will — NOT — serve the Führer as long as I live.’

After that it was like any other Sunday. Apart from the flags and the loudspeakers left behind on the Buttermarkt square, everything was normal. The shops stayed closed, but you could buy cake and you could see people coming out of the Café Kranz with precious parcels wrapped in coloured paper, holding them flat as they walked. Like every other Sunday, they went to the graveyard to put flowers on the graves. And then it was time to prepare for visitors in the afternoon.

You have to open the doors to be sure that the smell of soup is not lingering in the hallway when the visitors arrive. A sensitive nose can detect a hint of fat in the air, my mother says. Then you let the smell of baking take over. You would commit a mortal sin any time for a decent cup of coffee, my mother says, and then she laughs out loud, because that’s what her aunt Ta Maria always said. The smell of coffee and cake is like a hearty welcome, like an embrace. Your visitor will want to jump right into bed and snuggle up with the cake. And when you’re serving, you have to cut the slices without touching the cake. You have to serve with the same affection that has gone into the baking, using the silver trowel that has been in the family for generations. The cake has to appear on the plate as though it had never been touched by human hands.

On Sunday we went for a walk in the afternoon. We had to put on our coats and hats and gloves because it was windy and cold outside. My father criss-crossed his scarf over his chest and we did the same. Maria’s gloves were attached to an elastic band inside the sleeves of her coat so they wouldn’t get lost. We walked past the station where my father gets the train every day. We came to a place where we could kick through the brown leaves with a hissing noise. Sometimes my trousers rubbed against the inside of my leg and it was sore. And sometimes when we walked around the corner, the wind was so strong that we couldn’t even breathe or speak any more. We had to push hard against it until we started laughing.

Then we came to the shop and everyone got pocket money. Franz wanted a toffee pop and I wanted a bag of sherbet with a lollipop inside. We waited outside while my father and mother were still inside trying to help Maria decide what to buy. There were boys standing by the wall of the shop and they started calling us Nazis. There were lots of things like that written on the wall in paint, including a big swastika sign in red. They kept saying we were Nazis, until my mother came out and heard them.

‘Heil Hitler,’ they shouted.

They were not allowed to say that kind of thing and I looked at my mother to see what she would do. They said it again and laughed out loud, so there was no way that she might not have heard it. She even stopped and looked at them for a moment. But she said nothing. I knew she was biting her lip. I knew by her eyes that she was sad this was happening, but she could do nothing about it.

‘Come on, let’s walk ahead,’ she said. She didn’t wait for my father and Maria to come out, she just turned us around and walked away. Behind us we could hear them laughing and clicking their heels. I was sure my father would do something, but he said nothing either and we all walked quickly down to the seafront.

We could smell the sea and hear it because it was very rough. The waves were crashing in against the rocks, all white and brown. The seagulls were balancing in the air over the waves and we were standing in a line, holding on to the railings with brown rust marks growing through the blue paint. The dog was there, too, the dog that belongs to nobody and barks at the sea until he is hoarse and can’t speak. From behind the railings you could look the waves right in the eye as they came rushing in and my mother said: ‘God help anyone who is out at sea.’ The waves were so strong that when they threw themselves on to the rocks, the foam sprang up like a white tree. Bits of black seaweed were flung in the air with no mercy. We had to move back so as not to get wet. Only a tiny shower covered our faces and we could taste the salt. We shouted back at the waves but it was hard to talk because of the wind. Here’s a big one, my father said, but there was so much noise that you could hear nothing anyway, as if the sea was so loud, it was actually silent. My mother said nothing and just looked far away out into the waves. Bigger and bigger waves all the time, hitting the rocks and bouncing up, right in front of us.