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

‘ Leider ,’ the woman said and smiled.

My mother says everybody was afraid to smile and afraid to speak about things that didn’t have to do with getting enough food and making sure that everybody in your family was safe from the bombs. The woman started talking about where to get butter and where to get eggs and how difficult it was to make a good cake these days. Marianne said it was impossible to get any meat at all. The woman was very friendly and asked her where she lived. Marianne told her that she lived on the Mönchberg, up high, the last house before the castle. So then the woman said how nice it must be to live up there on the mountain, away from everything, with clean air and no noise and plenty of tranquillity. They kept talking for a while, because nobody was afraid of talking about good air and bad lungs and living away from other people coughing.

‘It would be a great place for a guest house up there,’ the woman said.

Marianne said she had never dreamed of it. She was expecting a baby and working every day with the German army and looking after her mother-in-law, too, who was very old. She was not afraid of work, but her husband was away in the war and she didn’t know where she would get the food for the guests. And not only that, she didn’t think anyone could afford to go on holidays any more.

‘I know people with bad lungs,’ the woman said. ‘They would love it up there.’

‘It’s a long way up,’ Marianne said, ‘without a car.’

But that would even be doing them a favour, the woman said. It would be good for them to get the air even as they were walking up. And that’s how Tante Marianne got the idea to open a guest house, my mother says. That’s how people started coming to visit her from all over the place for clean air and tranquillity, that’s how she has a name for keeping one of the most beautiful guest houses in all of Austria today, a place that has a long waiting list and you would never hear about from the tourist board, only by word of mouth.

It was thanks to the man with one arm and one eye who put the bomb in a briefcase. The bad bomb was good for one thing at least. It started a guest house on the Mönchberg where there never had been one before. It was strange that nobody had thought of it already, my mother says. It didn’t start as a big business, not like a big hotel. Just one guest at a time, or two at the most. They could stay up there and breathe in deeply and pretend that there was no war on at all.

Tante Marianne didn’t have to think about it for long, my mother says. She went home and got the place ready. And some days later, the first of the guests arrived, a Jewish woman who had no name and no face and no address. She didn’t stay for long, only two or three days at a time, and then she moved on again to another house somewhere else.

My mother says you can’t boast about things like that. You can say it to yourself. You can be proud that somebody had courage. But you can’t go around telling the whole world your aunt helped to harbour Jewish people and made a safe haven out of her house on the Mönchberg. You have to remember all the people who were not saved, too. You have to remember all the voices speaking from the graves. I want to tell everybody that I had an aunt who was not afraid to lose and stood up against the killing. I want to run out and tell the whole world that she helped people to breathe in Germany.

‘Maybe they won’t believe me,’ I say.

My mother says you know when something is true sometimes by the way nobody is boasting about it. Nobody is trying to turn it into a big story on the radio and asking people to clap. You know it’s true that Tante Marianne kept the silent negative in her head until she could do something about it, because nobody is talking about it much. Because it’s not written about in any newspaper.

The first Jewish woman to visit the guest house was not killed by the Nazis and went to America after the war. She never came back. But she told people what a wonderful guest house she stayed in on the Mönchberg. And later on, when other Jewish people like Ernst Rathenau started coming back from America after the war, they went straight to the Mönchberg on their holidays, as if there was no other place in the whole of Austria that had clean air. They came back to the guest house again and again, year after year, and they brought other famous people with them who were also against the Nazis, like the painter Oskar Kokoschka and the sculptor Giacomo Manzú and the singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. You know it’s true because why else would a Jewish man named Ernst Rathenau bring friends like that all the way up to the Mönchberg just for the air. And why would Ernst Rathenau, the cousin of Walther Rathenau who was assassinated by the Nazis before the war even started, come back from America and go straight up to visit a German woman who had lost her husband in the war? Marianne never heard from her husband Angelo again, but she had one daughter named Christiane. Ernst Rathenau even paid for Christiane to go all the way through university and become a doctor. Because Tante Marianne once did a favour to Jewish people and now they were paying her back.

My mother says you can only really be brave if you know you will lose. And the silent negative is not like any other silence either, because one day you will say what you’re thinking out loud with your arms folded, like Marianne. You can’t be afraid of saying the opposite, even if you look like a fool and everybody thinks you’re in the wrong country, speaking the wrong language. Everybody thought the man with the bomb in the briefcase was an idiot and they only wanted to laugh at him. And Tante Marianne must have looked like a fool standing up in the opera house in Salzburg, trying to get herself killed and saying what a pity Hitler wasn’t dead yet. My mother remembers the steam from the trains like fog on the platform. She remembers the sound of the whistle echoing through the station. She remembers seeing people crying all over Germany. She shows me the photographs of cities in Germany that were bombed. She heard once of a woman carrying her dead child with her in a suitcase. Sometimes you can’t think of anything else but the people you know. Sometimes people are afraid to look any further than their own family. That’s when you have to be brave.

When the winter came, my mother was told to go to Hamburg, to join a big camp full of women. From there they were sent mostly to the east to fight with the German troops. People were saying that it made no sense to go to the east because the war was lost already. Some people got a chance to go home one more time to say goodbye to their family as if they were never going to come back. My mother got letters from Tante Marianne asking for food and she wrote back to say that she would do her best. But it was nearly impossible to find anything, unless you were with the army going out to the war. My mother managed to get a bucket full of sauerkraut and instead of going back home to Kempen, she decided to try to get to Salzburg instead. She asked for a ticket to a different town called Kempten which sounds the same, and isn’t in the Rhineland at all, but somewhere in Bavaria. She carried the last bucket of sauerkraut with her all the way and it was snowing heavily when she arrived to deliver it.

Nobody wanted to go back to the war. My mother says she wanted to stay on the Mönchberg and hide until it was all over. She thought of staying and helping Marianne, because she was expecting her baby and had a husband in the war and a mother-in-law who was ill. But then she would only have to eat some of the sauerkraut that she had brought and that would make no sense any more. Marianne would be worse off. So at least, my mother says, she helped her with the washing before she left. She got all the clothes and the sheets together and boiled up lots of hot water. There was enough soap and starch to do it properly, and because it was so cold outside they dried everything inside. My mother hoped it would all take longer. She hoped it would take so long that somebody would say on the radio that the war was over. When the sheets were dry, my mother helped to iron them until they were like new. She laughed and helped Marianne to fold them together, taking one corner in each hand and dancing towards the middle like Irish dancing. The smell of the laundry made my mother think that she was a little girl again. She didn’t want the dancing with the sheets to stop. It was only when it was over and all the washing was finished that my mother realised how many sheets there were. She counted them in her head and thought, there were too many just for three women.