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

‘What matters,’ he said, ‘is that a small man was able to walk up to a big man and not be afraid.’

I knew it wasn’t over yet. I knew they would come looking for us again because I was Eichmann and I could do nothing about it. I wanted to be one of the fist people so that I could defend myself and not be afraid on the streets. From then on I wanted to be a real Nazi. I wanted to be so cruel and mean that they would be scared of me instead. In bed at night I thought of all the things I would do. I thought of bashing their heads against the wall. I thought of smashing a rock into some boy’s teeth. I would be famous all over the place. People would be afraid even to go swimming when I was out. I thought of them running away and hiding in doorways when they heard me coming, shivering at the sound of my name. Eichmann.

I started practising on my own. I learned how to do the evil smile. I learned to laugh like the Nazis do in films, slowly, while I was getting ready to torture somebody. I spoke English to myself in a German accent. I kept saying things like ‘my friend’ and being so polite that people would be even more frightened when they realised that I was going to kill them. I stuck knives into puppets and grinned into the mirror. I threw rocks at cats. I practised torturing Franz and Maria. And one day, I even threw a chair at my mother and there was nothing she could do about it. So she left the chair there where it fell and said nobody else would ever pick it up again and it could stay there for a hundred years.

‘Why do you want to be one of the fist people?’ she asked.

‘It’s boring to be good,’ I said.

I wanted to be as bad as possible. When you’re bad you get a good feeling because people look shocked and worried and that makes you want to be even worse. If you’re good nobody looks at you.

‘I’m Eichmann,’ I said. ‘I’m going to kill people and laugh about it.’

She brought me into the front room and showed me a book where there was a picture of a boy in the street with his hands up in the air saying don’t shoot. She told me about a place called Auschwitz and how Eichmann was the man in charge of the trains for getting people there. She could remember Jewish people in Kempen. They were called ‘ die Jüdchen : the little Jews’ because they lived in the small houses. She never saw any of them being taken away, but she said there was only one Jewish man who came back to Kempen after the war and he didn’t stay. He just came to look around once and then he left again and now there are no Jews in Kempen. She said they were our people. Our people died in concentration camps.

I wonder what it’s like for my cousins in Germany and if they still have to think about it every day like me. Is anyone calling them Nazis on the street? Here I have to be careful where I walk, because if they catch me then I’ll go on trial and they’ll execute me.

‘I don’t want to be German,’ I said.

She had tears in her eyes and said the Germans would never be able to go home again. Germans are not allowed to be children. They’re not allowed to sing children’s songs or tell fairy tales. They cannot be themselves. That’s why Germans want to be Irish or Scottish or American. That’s why they love Irish music and American music, because that gives them a place to go home to and be homesick for.

‘It’s like a birthmark,’ she said.

It was time for us to go down to the sea and look at the waves, because she had to carry on with her work. She stood at the door to watch us going across the street until we disappeared around the corner. I knew I was in the luckiest place in the world with the sea close by. The sun was shining and you could smell the dust in the air. There were tar bubbles on the road and further along you could see a shimmer, as if the ground was rising up in the heat. Some of the shops had canopies that were flapping in the breeze. The boats were out on the bay and there was a haze over the harbour. We went swimming, Noel, Franz and I. We dived under the water for as long as possible. I knew I could stop breathing longer than anyone else. I could stay down there until my lungs nearly burst. I was the champion at not breathing and not speaking. I could hear the voices around the pool, but they were muffled and far away. Down there it was blue and calm, like being inside a cool drink.

Sometimes the bees come into my room at night. They go after the light because they think it’s daytime and they want to get as close to the sun as possible. They go mad and whirl around the light until they crash into the bulb in the middle of the room and fall down. Then they pick themselves up and start again, whirling around and getting more and more excited and impatient, until you switch off the light and they move to the window instead. Then they buzz up and down the window for ages trying to get out to the light in the street, until they get so tired they drop down on the floor and crawl around in circles. They always go in circles when they’re dying, as if they’re trying to make themselves dizzy. You can’t let them out, and I have to sleep with my head covered up in case they come over and sting me in the middle of the night.

I know it’s the smallest things that hurt most because I got stung in the garden one day when I put my hand down on a bee in the grass. He had been hit by a drop of rain and was going mad in circles. When I put my hand down he stung me and after that nobody wanted to play on the grass any more. My father says that stings are good for you and we’ll never get rheumatism. If you want to reduce the pain, he says, you should take the sting out quickly to stop the poison going in. He explained that a bee sting is very different from a wasp sting, because a bee has a hook at the end of it and he showed it to us once under the microscope. He says we’ll soon get used to bee stings and won’t even feel them. And my mother says we shouldn’t howl so much every time a bee stings us because the neighbours will think we’re being tortured to death.

Sometimes when I’m inside the house I hear somebody screaming outside and I know it’s a bee sting. Maria or Ita or Franz, everybody has a different scream. And sometimes they scream before they’re even stung. If a bee goes near them they start shouting and running inside, as if they’re going to die. It’s not even the bee’s fault. They fly out over the garden and come back with pouches so full of pollen, like heavy suitcases. And when the wind suddenly blows around the corner at the back of the house, they get pushed back down into the garden and find it difficult to pick themselves up again. Sometimes the wind blows them into somebody’s hair and it’s not their fault because they just want to get back up and carry the pollen home to the hive. Then they get tangled up in hair. You hear Maria or Ita screaming and running into the house even though the bee hasn’t stung yet and is only trapped and buzzing like mad, trying to get back out.

One day it happened to my mother and we invented a way of stopping the bee from stinging. My mother came running inside and shouting that there was a bee in her hair. She held her hair right to try and stop it from getting closer to her head. The bee was probably lashing out and stinging everything it could touch because it was trapped in a prison of hair, like a spider’s web with no chance of getting out alive. But as long as it didn’t get close to the skin, then there was still a chance of stopping it from stinging. She told me to get a tea towel and put it on the place where the bee was. I could feel the buzzing under my fingers and I pressed hard until the buzzing went up to a high pitch, like a motorbike far away. Then I pressed even harder until I felt a crack under the towel and the bee was dead. Nobody said anything about it afterwards, in case my father would get angry that we were killing all his bees. After that I was the expert at stopping stings. I was the sting stopper.