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

‘Leave us alone,’ she said, but they just laughed.

Franz said nothing. He just stood there and waited in silence. He was doing what my mother always said we should do, to pretend they didn’t exist. I did the same. I tried to pretend that standing in that spot in the football field was exactly what I wanted to do at that moment. I remembered what my mother said about fighting. Maria stopped resisting, too, and they gave up putting snow under her jumper because it was no fun any more. They were not afraid of anything. They pushed us back against the wire fence of the football field with sticks. The leader of the gang was not even afraid of the cold, because he picked up snow and caked it into a flat, icy disc while the other boys all blew into their cupped red hands for warmth.

‘Nazi bastards,’ he said.

They made a circle around us and whispered among themselves. One of the boys was pushing a dirty piece of brown snow towards Franz with his shoe, saying that he was going to make him eat it. But Franz ignored him. I knew Franz was saying the silent negative in his head. Then Maria started crying and I wanted to cry as well only Franz stopped me.

‘Don’t indulge them,’ he said.

They repeated it a few times in a German accent. And for some of them it was a sign to start speaking in a kind of gibberish that made no sense. ‘ Gotten, Blitzen, fuckin’ Himmel .’ One of the boys started dancing around, trampling a circle in the snow with ‘ Sieg Heils ’ and I suddenly wanted to start laughing. I thought they were very funny and I wanted to be Irish like them, to laugh and make up some of these stupid words, too, all the stuff they had collected from the comics and from films where the Germans were always losers. One of them tried to speak German by himself with his face all contorted with pain.

‘ Rippen schtoppen … Krauts. Donner und Blitzen, Himmel, Gunther-Schwein … Messerschmidt …’ he said in one long burst. Then he suddenly died in the snow, falling back and shaking as if he was riddled with bullets. ‘ Aaargh …’

I couldn’t help laughing. I could see myself as part of the gang, joining in and walking around the streets with them, laughing at everything. It made me feel soft in my tummy to think that I could be friends with them. But the leader didn’t like it. He wanted me to be the enemy and to see how tough us Germans really were. So he flung the snowball and it hit me in the eye with a flash of white, like a hard lump of icy stone. I couldn’t see anything and I rubbed my eye, but I didn’t let myself cry because I didn’t want to let my brother down. I showed them that nothing could hurt me and that Germans didn’t feel pain.

They continued to talk among themselves, trying to decide what to do with us. I heard one of them say that we should be put on trial.

‘Yeah, put them on trial,’ they all agreed.

‘Guilty or not guilty?’

I knew that whatever they said about us we could never deny it. Whether it was true or not didn’t matter any more. They said things about the sinking of the Bismarck or the gas ovens but we didn’t know anything like that yet. I wanted to tell them what my mother said about the silent negative, but I knew they would only laugh at that. It was no use. We were at the mercy of their court in the snow. There was nobody else in the world to say who was right or wrong. Everybody was inside on Christmas day and we were alone on the white football field with a breeze pushing the tops of the trees behind us. Above the tall goal posts, the sky was grey and green again and it looked like there would be more snow. Low on the sky there were flashes of white or silver seagulls and I knew we just had to wait.

‘We have to go home now,’ Maria suddenly said, as if she could just bring this whole thing to an end by acting like an adult. She tried to move forward, but they only pushed her back again.

‘Execute them,’ one of them shouted.

They didn’t even have time for a trial. Maybe they were numb with the cold like us and wanted to go home to eat sweets and play with toys, so they decided to get on with the sentence and started to make snowballs. One of them said to pack them hard and another one of them included the discoloured piece of snow in his armoury, and when they all had heaps of white cannon balls ready beside their feet, we waited for the order and watched the leader of the gang raise his hand. It seemed like an endless wait. I thought of all kinds of things that had nothing to do with being a Nazi. I remembered that the words in Irish for grey and green are the same. I thought of marzipan potatoes. And the peculiar skull-shaped design of plum pudding. I thought of the bell on the wall of my father and mother’s bedroom that didn’t work any more, and I thought of the three little dials on the gas meter under the stairs, until the hand eventually came down and a shout brought with it a hail of blinding white fire.

‘It’s only snow,’ Franz said.

He had his hands up over his eyes. Even after they were gone and the football field was empty and silent and it was already starting to get dark, he still had his hands up.

We might as well have been in Kempen, sitting in the front room eating Christmas cake, while my father lit the candles on the Christmas tree one more time. We sat on the carpet and played a game of cards where one person was always left with a picture of the black crow and had to be marked on the nose with a piece of charcoal, until everybody was a loser once and had a black nose. My father stood up and opened the door of the big bookcase to take out the bottle of Asbach Uralt. He took out the cork with a tiny, high-pitched squeak that sounded like a hiccup and poured two glasses so that the room filled up with a smell of cognac, along with the smell of pine needles and matches and candle wax.

‘A cognac-een,’ my mother called it. She liked to make things sound smaller than they were, like they did in Irish, too, because everything was better when it was small and harmless and less greedy. She sipped slowly and closed her eyes so she could think about what she was drinking. She said it was like a little kiss from God above. She laughed and said it again, like a tiny, little kiss from God.

My father then put on a record. He took it out of the sleeve and made sure not to touch the music with his fingers as he placed it on the turntable. He frowned as he did it, but I knew that nobody could be angry, because it was Christmas. When he dropped the needle down lightly with his index finger, you could hear a crackle before the woman began to sing in German, a high voice that was so beautiful, my mother said, it was like silver coins falling down the stairs. And at the end, there was a single note that rose up so high in the air that it stayed in the room long after the song was over.

Sometimes a candle crackled and spluttered. And outside it was dark. I knew the football field was empty now and there was nobody out in the world. More snow was covering the footprints and it was easy to forget what happened. We had been executed but we were warm and there was a nice smell of the Christmas tree in the room, so it was easy to forget how cold and numb your hands could be outside. We had orange juice to drink and chocolate angels to eat. My father was putting on another record and my mother sniffed the cognac-een. Everybody was safe now and we were lucky to be German, but I knew it wasn’t over yet.

I keep thinking of things not happening.

If you lie in bed and think hard enough, you can pretend that lots of things don’t happen. I can pretend that I’m floating above the bed and that my feet are miles away across the sea. I can pretend that I can’t use my left arm, that I only have one arm, like Mr Smyth in the vegetable shop. I can pretend that my father has no limp. And I keep thinking there was no such thing as Hitler, or the Nazis, because then my mother would not fall on the ice and break her teeth. The day we go down to Mass early in the morning, when it’s still dark and there’s ice on all the roads and we have to hold her hand, I keep thinking that didn’t happen.