Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

To my mind, he looked OK. I liked him. My first impression was all I had to go by and that gave me no reason to believe otherwise. He seemed like a good enough father from the outside. He had silver hair and his eyes were clear. His chest was out. His shoulders were square. He wore a light-coloured suit, his shoes were polished and he looked very solid, like he never needed help from anyone, like he never missed a bus or got caught in the rain, like he never found the shops closed and nowhere to get milk, all those ordinary things that people had to think about seemed to be far from his mind. He looked trouble-free. Like he never lost his temper and he never had a bad word to say about anyone, somebody who was liked by everyone, with no guilt and nothing to answer for. He looked welcoming, like he shook hands with people a lot, like he remembered everybody’s name.

He gave me the impression that he wanted to have a conversation with me and I could come back to him once I had something to remember. He took his time passing me by and I turned around at the top of the stairs. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs for a moment to check the carnation in his jacket. And by the time I got the words right in my head he was already gone.

I said good evening to the smile that was left behind.

When I read her book years later, I could not believe this was the same man I had seen passing me on the stairs. His smile made me think that he had a lovely family and I could only imagine that if I had had a father like that myself, my problems would be over. He seemed full of calmness. Like he had no anger in him. Like he owned a yacht or an American car or maybe that he knew how to fly a plane. Maybe he could have been an actor in a movie at some point, or that he was good with cards and knew lots of tricks and stories that he could entertain people with.

I didn’t want to believe that he murdered his own son.

She said her father was just like the King in Don Carlo and he killed her brother.

Not that I’m arguing with her memory, but I still think of her father well. I thought she was exaggerating. And you know something, I never told her that I met him. I didn’t want to bring it up. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he didn’t look as bad as he was.

What am I saying? This is what I’m saying. At the end of her first book she said she could forgive her parents. And then, at the end of the second book she says her parents are murderers and she could never forgive them. So I was only thinking it would not be all that difficult to persuade her to go back to the first version again, that’s all.

I think forgiveness is a bit overrated. They keep going on about it nowadays. Open up. Forgive the past. Especially things you can do nothing about. Things you cannot possibly change at this point, like where you entered your life. You have to forgive yourself, that’s what they say. They have a new way of speaking about all these things, like they never raise their voices and nobody ever loses their temper any more in Ireland. You hear them on the radio now with that suave voice, the new spiritual, she calls it.

She was not letting anybody off the hook, especially now.

Nothing will ever change if you go all soft, Liam. You can’t look back all soggy with nostalgia, she said, everything is all right, nobody meant any harm, sure let’s all forget about it and be nice and enjoy our lives. She could not take the dishonesty of it, like people going back to Mass, people saying they miss the way things were under Communism.

I’m not changing my story, she said.

It must have been around the same time, when I saw her father on the stairs, that she came back from London to live in Dublin again. It could have been the same evening for all I know. Her father found out where she was living and went to see her, just turned up at the door. She had come back to Ireland to say all the things that were unsaid. All the things that Irish people didn’t know how to say about themselves yet, so many things that needed to be confronted out loud. Everything inside the family had always been kept inside the family, that was the rule up to that time, with no outside interference. It was none of anyone’s business outside the front door, only the priest and God. Things were bad enough economically without bringing private, social matters out into the open, and she came back to Dublin to take the roof off the family. She was walking straight into all the houses in Ireland that were still keeping their secrets.

Her father was furious with her. He heard what people were saying around the city. He was furious at her curly hair and the freedom of speech she was allowing herself. He didn’t think a woman could be so much like him, least of all his own daughter, drinking like her mother and sleeping around like her father. Maybe he was afraid of her revealing things about him, killing his own son. That whole Don Carlo thing going on inside the family.

It wasn’t time yet for the rhythm of honesty.

Her father was standing in her flat, she said. It was nothing more than a bedroom with a kitchen in it. All she could do was smile at him, because she was paying her own rent and her own electricity bills and that made him even more furious, her independence. She was not a helpless woman. All he could do was shout. And she kept smiling. He said she would be nobody without him, if he hadn’t sold his car and borrowed another car to get her into boarding school and save her from married men. What made him most angry was that she was pretending not to be his daughter any more, even though everyone knew who she was. No matter how famous he was, he had no power over her any longer. He threatened her. She never felt so much alone with a man before as with her own father. And the only way that he could think of losing his temper was to kick something. He kicked the cupboard underneath the sink. The door of the cupboard opened with the force of it. The bin fell out, spilling the contents across the room. They both stared at what he had done and she wrote it all down in her memory, her collection. He walked out and left the tea leaves scattered on the floor behind him.

They’ve installed a hydraulic lift out in the open, outside the Pergamon Museum. Getting Úna up the steps would have been impossible, even for myself and Manfred together. Manfred wheels her onto the ramp and secures the wheelchair to make it safe, then closes the gate. She’s smiling like a child, she loves it. As if she’s at a funfair, going up slowly with the magnificent building behind her, all those large windows, the canal around the front and the overhead trains going by in the distance.

The Pergamon Altar is great. I know the Nazis loved it, she says, let’s not forget that. But that doesn’t stop you admiring the sheer size of it, like a city inside a huge room. It makes you feel small and powerless. The altar with the wide marble steps and the temple at the top is only a tiny fragment of the city, you can check that on the scale model. And around the walls are these marble carvings showing what people were up to in those days.

Figures of semi-naked men and women. Some peaceful scenes, women bathing, children playing, men carrying fruit. And war. Plenty of war. Arms and legs missing, never found or reattached by archaeologists. Horses with missing heads. Chariots. People in rage. People in agony. A lion biting into the leg of a man, all that kind of thing.

There was an echo around the hall, I remember. Groups of people with blue earphones on, listening to the history being replayed as they walked around. People sitting on the marble steps talking, calling each other. And children. A small girl shouting, testing the echo. I could not find out where the child’s voice was actually coming from. I checked all the children there, so in the end, I thought it might have been a child in one of the sculptures. From the past. A child of Pergamon still echoing around the room.