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

‘Vati,’ I said. ‘It’s me.’

I waited for him to look down, but he didn’t see me. He was thinking of all the things he had not finished yet and all the things he was still going to do when he got the time. He put the paper under his arm and walked away. I wanted to run after him as if he was my father. I wanted to tug him by the sleeve of his coat. I wanted him to talk to me about things like films or football. But he didn’t know anything about that. And, anyway, I would have to pretend he was my friend and go all the way home on the train with him. We would have to talk Irish together, as if there was no other language in the world. Everybody would look at us. They would know that we were homeless and had nowhere to go, because we lost the language war. They would know that we were still locked in the wardrobe and didn’t know any better.

I didn’t move. I didn’t run after him. I knew I was doing the same thing as he had done to his own father, the sailor. I stood still and heard the brakes of the buses screeching. I saw the people in a long queue waiting. I saw the windows of the buses steamed up and the places where people rubbed a circle clear to look out. I heard the man shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ and the echo still coming back across the street over the traffic. I watched my father walking away towards the train station like one of the ordinary people of Dublin. I watched his limp and his briefcase swinging, as if I had never seen him before in my life.

One day a man put a bomb in a briefcase and went out to work, like my father. He looked at his watch because he had an important meeting to go to and he wanted to be there on time. It was a hot day and he brought a clean shirt with him as well. Before the meeting, he asked everybody to wait a few minutes so he could change his shirt first. They told him to hurry up and waited outside while he went into a room and clicked open the briefcase with the bomb inside instead of his lunch and his flask. He took out the shirt and started getting the bomb ready straightaway. It was two bombs really, but he could only fix the fuse on one of them, because he had been injured in the war and only had one arm, like Mr Smyth in the vegetable shop. He could only see with one eye, too, because there was a patch over the other one, but he was not afraid to die and he took out a small set of pliers and did his best. Everybody knows how long it takes to change your shirt, even if you only have one arm. He was taking so long that somebody came to the door to ask what was keeping him and then his hand started shaking, so he decided, in the end, that one of the bombs would be more than enough. He changed his shirt quickly and came out again with the briefcase in his hand. The empty sleeve of the missing arm was tucked into the pocket of his jacket, like Mr Smyth. He didn’t have to shake hands with anyone and nobody knew what he was thinking either, because he was like Onkel Ted and not afraid of silence. They didn’t know that there was a bomb inside the briefcase for Germany, and when he got to the meeting where they were all standing around a table and looking at the map of the world, he gave the briefcase to another man and told him to put it as close to Hitler as possible. Then he walked away and heard the explosion right behind him. He thought Hitler was dead and everybody was free again, but that was a big mistake because, after all that trouble, Hitler wasn’t even hurt and came out with only a bit of dust on his uniform.

‘Make sure of it,’ my mother says. ‘For God’s sake, don’t just walk away and leave it to somebody else.’

The man who planted the bomb was arrested in Berlin very shortly afterwards. His name was Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and he was immediately taken out into a square to be executed by firing squad, along with some of the people who were on his side. Later on, his brother and all his friends were arrested, too, and put on trial for planning a puppet show against Hitler. They were put to death in a very cruel way and their children were taken away and given new names so they would forget who they were. One of the boys wrote his real name on the inside of his lederhosen, but they were all sent to a special school so that they would grow up as Nazis, and none of the puppets would ever try and speak against Hitler again.

Afterwards, Hitler went on the radio to tell everyone in the world that he was alive and still had two eyes and two ears and two of everything. In case there was a mistake and some people might not have heard the radio, they collected everyone together in halls and theatres and schools to tell them that Hitler never felt better. My mother says that she was on a platform waiting for a train when she heard the news that he was not dead yet and the war was still on. Her sister Marianne was working in Salzburg and had to go to a big meeting in the opera house to be told what happened, as if they were about to hear some music. When everybody was sitting down in their seats and all the coughing and whispering stopped, an SS man came out on stage to make a speech. He said there was some bad news. Somebody had betrayed Germany and tried to kill Hitler with a bomb. But there was nothing to worry about, he said, because Hitler was still alive and could never be killed, not even by a bomb in the same room. Then Marianne stood up.

‘ Leider ,’ she said out loud for everyone to hear. ‘What a pity.’

The audience turned around to look at her standing up with her arms folded against the Nazis. Everybody in the whole opera house was waiting for her to be taken away and maybe even executed immediately. But then at the last minute, an older woman she had never seen before stood up beside her and spoke very calmly.

‘ Ja, leider ,’ the woman said. ‘Yes, what a pity such a thing can happen.’

Then everybody thought it was just a mistake. Maybe Marianne wasn’t a woman against Hitler with her arms folded, but a woman so much for Hitler that she was not afraid to stand up and say it out loud. Before Marianne could say anything more, before she could say that she really wished Hitler had been killed by the bomb and that his two of everything had been blown to bits, the woman pulled her back down quickly into the seat and told her to stop trying to get herself killed.

My mother says it’s hard to tell that story, even it it’s true. Nobody will believe it any more, because lots of people made up things like that after the war. Everybody wanted to prove they were against the Nazis and never said a word against Jewish people in their lives and even saved lots of them from being killed. If all the stories were true, then how come Hitler was alive for so long and there weren’t more Jewish people found all over Germany when the war was over. People who are guilty usually point the finger. It’s the people who really were against the Nazis who don’t want to boast about it. Most of the people who were against the Nazis disappeared and can’t speak for themselves.

In the book she got from Onkel Ted about Eichmann, there is a story about a German man who helped the Jews in Poland. He gave them guns against his own country, against Germany. When the Nazis found out what he was doing, they killed him straightaway. And afterwards he was forgotten by everybody because what he did was not enough to stop what happened in the end. He might as well not have bothered. Nobody wanted to know. All the books and films are about the bad people, my mother says, not the good people. It was the same with the man who changed his shirt and brought the bomb in a briefcase to meet Hitler. He was forgotten and he might as well not have bothered either, because so many people were murdered by the Nazis that it’s hard to think of anything else. He was not very good at making a bomb, because he was not very good at hating people. And it’s hard to start boasting about somebody who was not very good at killing Hitler or giving away guns against the Nazis or standing up with your arms crossed and saying it was a pity Hitler wasn’t dead.