Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

They want to know if there was anything more I found out about Úna. While I was in Berlin. As if I had the missing clue. Something about her I was keeping to myself, some tiny detail she left behind that would reveal who she really was. But who am I to describe her life? We were just good friends, don’t forget. I was her companion, not her lover, we had no previous history between us.

All I can say is read her books, that’s who she was. That’s her story, in her own words, you can’t get better than that. Talk to the people who loved her. Talk to Noleen. Talk to the men in her life. Talk to her family, her friends, the people she worked with, the people who know her better than I do. The only thing I can add is that she loved travelling. I brought her to Berlin and she loved every single minute, that’s what she said. She didn’t want to stop, she said she was having the time.

What am I trying to say? I can give you a kind of summary of what I know, but it’s nothing like meeting her, hearing her speaking for herself. So maybe that’s the missing clue? Her presence. Her being alive. A memoir is not a living person, no matter how true it is, that’s what I’m trying to say. I know this goes against her opinion that everybody is the sum of their own story and people are nothing more than walking stories, but I don’t know if putting together what she told me is ever going to match listening to her live, in her own voice.

She was the kind of person who was no good at inventing things. She preferred real facts. She liked to be at the centre of the facts herself. That’s how she wrote her books, putting down a list of facts, first-hand. And sometimes she got the truth mixed up with the facts. She thought you had to tell all the facts to tell the truth. She said some facts were so true you couldn’t make them up and some facts were so true they spoke for themselves.

She didn’t know how to keep things to herself. She was the kind of person who spoke to everyone in the street. She usually took the leaflet for the free pizza offer and she would sign the petition for an environmental impact study and stop to say hello to the man with two dogs, the man singing ‘Angie’ on a portable amplifier. Whatever city she was in, she got people talking about themselves, because she knew only too well what it’s like when people pretend you don’t exist. And sometimes she was in too much of a hurry and there was no time for any of that, taking notice of people. And the thing she hated most was somebody you had already given money to coming back two minutes later as if they had never seen you before.

She was full of anger, plenty of it. She would be the first to admit that herself, we can all be like that from time to time. She could be jealous and hurt and those things people feel in the course of their lives, afraid of others doing better, more money, more successful, women more beautiful. She was on the side of women and she was also afraid of women. She stood up for women and she was jealous of them. She would walk over any women in the world to take a man away from a woman. She was straight and she was gay. She turned in every direction for love.

She loved bells. At one point, while we were driving through Berlin, she wanted to listen to the bells. She sat forward suddenly and told Manfred to stop the car, I thought there was something wrong. Manfred, she shouted, stop the car, this minute. Here. Stop, right here, anywhere, she said. So Manfred had to pull in at the nearest loading bay so that she could roll down the window to let the bells in.

We were right next to the church and it was deafening, you couldn’t hear a thing. It was like a roof closing down on the city, the bells were gone mad. They were furious, so it seemed to me. Even the traffic going by was silent. Manfred switched off the engine and we sat there and listened, like New Year’s Eve. You could feel the bells more than hear them. Actually, we realized that we were also hearing other bells from other churches farther away. The bells had some kind of harmony going. Maybe not so much a harmony but the sound of each bell layered on top of the other, humming in our ears. And the thing was this, when the bells stopped ringing, they didn’t really stop. We continued hearing them as they were fading away, like somebody getting his breath back.

She was not the kind of person who went into churches much. She had no time for God, only that couldn’t get out of the habit of using God as an expression. God Almighty. God help us. She didn’t see the point in God, but she still wanted her funeral to be held in a church and she still wanted to go into the church left in ruins, it was on the itinerary which Manfred had on the dashboard, to light a candle for her brother.

And after all that she said about her brother, she still could not help but admire her father. She loved it when people came up to her and said she was her father’s daughter. And when he died, there was such a big funeral for him, as big as her own funeral, because he was so well loved, he was the king. She was in bits after his death and started drinking like her mother. She said she didn’t see any point in drinking unless you drank too much. As a child she was used to people coming home drunk at night. Every time somebody came in late she expected them to be drunk, crashing into things, laughing or angry. She said she would never forgive her father for any of that, and still when she heard his voice on the radio it tore the lungs straight out of her chest. She tried to talk to her mother but her mother was always too drunk to listen. She found her mother often collapsed on the floor and she was left banging on the window, thinking she was dead. And then one day her mother was found dead, lying face down on the bathroom floor with all the bruises from previous falls.

At one point, Úna was driving out to the west and she realized you could switch off your own emotions like a car radio. It was like hearing nothing. Like being underwater. She discovered how to live her own life and pursue her own happiness instead of worrying about her family.

It was a bit of a surprise arriving at the church in ruins because there was so little to see. All there was left was the broken steeple, as if the war had only happened the other day. We went in and saw the shell of the church from inside, only the mosaic ceiling in one part still intact, quite well preserved, with a few cracks running through it. We saw pictures taken of the church before the war when it was still standing and nobody could have had any idea how the place would look in ruins after the war. Imagine not knowing, she said. And right beside the ruins was the new church, built as a replacement, a modern octagonal shape made up of small blue windows or blue stained pieces of glass, like a million blue squares with light coming through. So the whole church was full of blue light. It was like being inside a blue vase, no matter what the weather was like outside it was always full of blue light, blue across the floor, blue across the benches, blue across our faces.

At the door, there was a basket of apples, so you could give a donation to the church and take an apple. There was a drawing of the Madonna that she wanted to see, an oval shape of a mother wrapped around a child, keeping it warm, drawn in charcoal on the back of a street map of Stalingrad during the war.

At the candle-stand there was a small steel container attached to a chain, with a slot for the money at the top. The coins made a clinking sound as I threw them in. The tray had real candles, naked flame, not like in some churches where you pay for an electric light flickering, low voltage. So I lit a candle for her brother, Jimmy. Then I placed it into an empty space on the tray and we looked at it for a while.