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

You can inherit things like that. It’s like a stone in your hand. I’m afraid that I’ll have a limp like him. I’m afraid I might start sticking the tip of my tongue out the side of my mouth when I’m fixing something. I know I have to be different. I have to listen to different music and read different books. I have to pretend that I had no father. I have to go swimming a lot and dive underwater and stay down there as long as I can. I have to learn to hold my breath as long as I can and live underwater where there’s no language.

I know they’re still after me. One day when I was swimming on my own, they found me pretending that I was not a Nazi or an Irish speaker who was dying. They knew it was Eichmann gone swimming and diving underwater. There was a big gang this time and I couldn’t run away. There was nobody else around either to save me. No gardener. No old man swimming with pink skin as if the water was not cold. It was Sunday morning with the bells ringing and rain coming. They started throwing stones at me, every time I came up for air. So then I had to come out of the water and they put me on trial.

I stood in the shed where you change. But I couldn’t get dressed because they started kicking my clothes around. They laughed and asked me questions I couldn’t answer. One of them had a knife and said he had ways of making me talk. They stood around, punching and kicking me to see if I was guilty or not.

I knew that was the reason why my mother came to Ireland in the first place. One day in the front room she told me that after the war she got a job in Wiesbaden with the American army. She worked in the de-nazification courts, she said, where they examined people to see if they were really Nazis or not. Before they could start working again and behaving like normal decent people, some of the Germans had to be put on trial and asked lots of questions to see what they had been up to in the war and if they had helped the Nazis. She had to make all the notes of what people said and then type them up afterwards. It was a good job and everybody said she was so lucky. Maybe she would even meet an American and get married. But one day, there was an old man before the court, a gynaecologist. He said he had no time for Hitler because he was only helping women with babies getting born. He said he didn’t care if babies were German or not, they were all good babies to him. But they didn’t believe him. In the end, a Jewish woman came home to Germany from England to speak up for him. She said he was always very friendly to her and that he helped her when it was difficult to have a baby. That should have settled everything, but afterwards when my mother was typing everything up, they came and asked her to change the words around. They wanted the Jewish woman to say he was always very angry and that he only wanted Nazi babies. But my mother couldn’t. So then she wrote a letter to say that she would not work there any more. Everybody said she was mad giving up a great job like that with a flat in Wiesbaden and American food when everybody in Germany was hungry. But she could only think of the old gynaecologist sitting in court very quietly and not even trying to defend himself. He said he liked German music and German books, but that didn’t make him hate other people. He was one of the last good men in Germany and they were trying to turn him into a Nazi.

She left her job and went away, on a pilgrimage to Ireland.

My mother says there are enough guilty people and we don’t need to invent them. There are enough murderers left in the world today and we don’t need to make up Nazis that didn’t exist. And there’s no point in turning the Nazis into big film stars either, because then everybody will be blind to all the other things that are going on now.

There’s no point in telling any of that to the gang at the seafront. There’s no point in saying that they’re kicking the wrong person and that I’m not really Eichmann, that I was brought up to live against the Nazis and I don’t want to kill anyone. There’s no point in telling them that they’re making a mistake and they don’t know any better.

I had no cigarettes and no chewing gum to give them either, so then I thought the best thing was to try to be funny and Irish like everyone else. I tried to put on the slow grin that Nazis have in films. I stood up and shouted: ‘ Sieg Heil, Donner Messer Splitten, Himmel Blitzen .’ Some of them laughed a bit, but they didn’t want me to start being their friend. They stood around, trying to decide how they would execute me. All I could do was stand under the shed and wait. There was a pool of water around my feet and I felt the cold stone under my heels. I tried to stop myself from shivering. There was rust on the blue railings and green seaweed on the rocks. There was a mist on the sea and the water was licking the steps, going up two steps and back down one, down two steps and back up three like a song. The seagulls were standing around on the rocks, just watching and listening, only one of them occasionally lifting his wings and screeching as if he was the judge.

I tried to talk to them. I tried to tell them my story but there was no point. I asked them did they not trust me? But they just laughed. And there was no point in trying to be innocent. My mother says you can only be innocent if you admit the guilt. You can only grow up if you accept the shame.

Then they started the execution. One of them kicked me so hard that I had to bend over. There was a black pain spreading up into my stomach and I thought I was going to get sick. I couldn’t stop the foggy dew in my eyes, but I tried to look up as if Germans didn’t feel any pain. One of them punched me in the face and I saw blood on my towel. I knew that they were learning to hate and that you’re allowed to hate Germans. They wanted me to surrender.

I looked up to show that I was not afraid to be silent. And then I saw the dog. I nearly forgot about the execution when I saw the dog behind them, the dog that barks all day until he’s hoarse. I couldn’t believe it at first and I had to wipe my eyes to make sure. The dog with no name was coming down to bark at the sea as if nothing was wrong and he never drowned.

‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I said. ‘It’s the dog.’

They looked around as if I was trying to play a trick on them and get away. They said all the Germans were gone mad because I was calling the dog over to save my life.

‘It’s the dog with no name,’ I said again.

He didn’t drown after all. He must have rescued himself. He must have got up the steps and shook the water off his back and forgotten it even happened, because he came right over to where we all were standing in the courtroom by the sea. The courtroom in the forty-foot gentlemen’s bathing place. He started sniffing around my clothes and socks scattered on the ground. He came right over and sniffed at me, too. He didn’t blame me for anything and I was able to pet him as if we were friends for life. I heard them laughing and saying that the Kraut has lost it completely now. I heard them saying they were going to execute me even more after that for being so stupid, but I didn’t care and they could say it until they were hoarse and had no voice any more, because the dog was alive and I didn’t kill him.

‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I kept saying. ‘Jaysus what the Jaysus of a bully belly Jaysus.’

There was nothing they could do to hurt me now. So I picked up one of my shoes and threw it into the sea. It was the only thing I could think of doing, because I grew up being good at saying the opposite and giving the wrong answers. I was not afraid any more. Laugh at yourself and the world laughs with you. Execute yourself and nobody can touch you. I heard them say that I was out of my mind and the Nazis were mental. So I picked up the other shoe and threw it out as well, and then the dog with no name ran after it and started barking. My shoes were floating on top of the water and there was nothing they could do. They didn’t know how to execute me any more. They couldn’t touch me because the dog was alive and barking. He was trying to go down the steps and get my shoes back, barking and barking as if he never drowned.