Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

I asked her was there anyone else? Did she want to light one for her parents maybe?

One for your mother and father, I said.

No, she said.

She wanted no candle lit for her mother and father, absolutely not, only her brother. It was hopeless trying to persuade her to forgive, because you could never forgive something that was done to another person, she said, only something that was done to yourself.

I’m not entitled to forgive what was done to my brother, she said.

Her brother was only a child at the time, she said. He saw what was going on. He told her what happened, in letters. He wrote to her, putting it all down on paper as though he could give the memory away to her for safe-keeping. He wrote telling her what he remembered, because she was the writer in the family and she would know what to do with the information. She carried that information with her all over the world, the story of her brother became part of her own story. And even though it was all told in her books, it was still impossible for him to get rid of the noise that remained inside his head. Ever since he was a small boy, he carried that sound like a companion walking beside him, whispering in his ear. What he witnessed would never stop, even though his mother and father were both long gone now. No matter how many letters he wrote, the memory would always belong to him.

He was at the mercy, she said.

He heard his mother was calling for help. He heard the sound of his father’s fist. He heard the sound of his mother’s face. He heard the love leaving his mother at night and never coming back, there was nothing he could do to help her. And then he hid himself in a drawer. He was not much more than four years old at the time and he was trying to get away from what he heard, they found him asleep in the drawer of the wardrobe next morning.

Would it make a difference if I had been able to tell her about the future, how things turn out? I would love to have told her that I’ve come back here to Berlin and the church with the blue light is still the same, no difference. The same blue squares of glass all around and the blue sunlight entering through them, spreading evenly across everyone who comes in. You get the impression that your hands are turning blue and silent, remembering. You come out into the brightness of the street with your blue fingers sensitive to the noise of traffic. Time has moved on a good bit into the autumn now, I would love to tell her. The city has kept going, moving ahead of you and it’s changed colour again to brown and copper and red and everything in between. Leaves curled up and crunching under your feet. Leaves spread out along the path in the park, men and women making great piles of them with wide rakes. I would love her to have seen the way the city looks at this time. Leaves in the shop windows, hanging, falling around the display of writing materials, handpicked leaves in unbelievable colours like blood red and yellow as flame, some of them still holding on to green at the edges, in among pens and diaries and leather-bound photo albums.

And lanterns.

I would love her to have seen the lanterns. One evening when I was coming through the park and it was already dark, I want to tell her, I saw about ten or fifteen of them gathered in an open space. Other lanterns came out from the trees around the edge of the park to join in with them. They were mostly orange, but other colours as well. It made me think of a luminous underwater creature, shifting and changing shape constantly. That’s how I would describe it to her. And then I saw that they were all mothers and fathers with children. Some of the lanterns turned out to be faces lit up by lanterns. One of the lanterns broke away and started moving quickly up a small hill with another lantern after it. Until they both came back and joined in with the main group again. Then the entire collection of lanterns began moving very slowly towards me. There must have been about thirty or forty of them in all, I would say, getting closer and closer until I was surrounded by lanterns, all singing as they passed me by.

That would have been good for her to see.

I would love to have told her some more optimistic things. Would that have made a difference to the way she thought of me, the general impression that she took away with her at the end of her life?

Your daughter will be all right, she said to me.

It’s good to remember her saying that. She was guessing at the future in her absence, telling me not to worry so much, things would take care of themselves, you can’t plan out everything in advance. As regards what she thought of me, I don’t know. She was free to assume anything she liked, she had that gift. And I could no more influence her view of me than I can influence what other people think of me. It’s not in my hands to shape the story that people remember.

All I could think of telling her in Berlin was that my brother continues to keep the house where we grew up intact, the same front door, the same windows, everything unchanged. The pictures, the books, the hallway table, even the mice running along the floor, they still have the same entry-point under the stairs. If I was living there, I told her, I might have ripped everything out including the old plumbing, that’s me, I have the tendency to renovate. My brother is happy to live with his childhood around him.

Everything is there, I told her. The view overlooking the back gardens, the apple trees, the granite walls with the snails hiding in the ivy, the back gate that never closed properly. Even the sky is unchanged, still shaking with the bang of my father’s fist on the table. And the sash window that broke one night in a storm. My father came rushing into the bedroom full of anger and I thought he was coming to punish me, but he was only coming to close the window, which was rattling. It was the days of wood and putty, the sash frame was rotten, and when he tried to close it down, the bottom of the frame came apart in his hands like a piece of fruit cake. The glass was smashed. My father had to find a way to cover the gaps, so he switched on the light and looked around the room for the nearest thing at hand. In the corner of the room there was an old atlas, a big rolled-up school atlas which he kept from the time he was a schoolteacher in Dunmanway. He rolled it out and nailed it up against the window frame. It’s a temporary solution, he said. Go to sleep. So that’s how I fell asleep, looking at the world from my bed, with my back against the wall. All the anger was outside. The branches of the trees throwing shadows onto the world and the wind flapping across the oceans.

I never thought it was possible to live without anger in Ireland. Maybe my father was also like the King in Don Carlo . He was full of love and guilt and fear of losing his power. But he was not trying to kill me. He was just very sensitive to noise, that’s all. Even the phone would make him jump. I don’t know what made him like that, maybe he was still listening out for all the things that scared him, things from his own childhood perhaps, his own father missing. He was scared by the noise of children. It was like something he couldn’t fix, like water hammer. He didn’t know what to do with children making noise. And the only thing you could do with water hammer was to rip out the whole plumbing system and start again from scratch. He loved children in his own way. He was good at remembering birthdays. He was good at buying mouth organs and geography magazines and teaching the rules of chess. But he couldn’t take any of us running around the house, bouncing on beds or jumping down three steps at the bottom of the stairs, it would make him leap up from his chair and the book would fly out of his hand, we were worse than water hammer.