Hugo Hamilton - Every Single Minute

She made me work things out for myself. It’s only in Berlin with her that I discovered how to remember, how time was always going backwards in our family. I was a child watching, like her, unable to explain it until I went back and began to remember the same things as my brother.

Why was it so difficult for my father’s brother to come and visit my mother? And why was my mother so unhappy about him not coming? I didn’t understand why anyone would want a visit from somebody who remained so silent, somebody whose silence was so terrifying. Now I think of the Jesuit and his silence more as a quiet aggression in the house. Withholding words. Saying nothing seems worse than saying the worst. It’s only now that I understand how it was exactly this silence in my father’s brother that my mother admired so much. After my father died, she sat looking out the window at the gardens unchanged, waiting for him, the Jesuit. But he was in love with my aunt. The Jesuit was unable to visit because my aunt was afraid he still loved my mother. Because my father’s brother and my mother had so much to remember together. Every baptism, every communion, every time we were sick with asthma and he came up the stairs and silently made the sign of the cross over us so we could breathe again. Every time he came to pray for better school results, every time there was a problem in the house between me and my father and the Jesuit had to come and act as a mediator, only that he never said a word, just kept his silence.

There was great excitement whenever my father’s brother came to see us. My mother made us put on our best clothes, she put the best table-cloth on the table, she made the best cake and she quickly took off her apron when she heard the bell ringing. My father’s brother brought sweets in his pocket, and books, and silence. Silence that made my father jealous. Books that made him suspicious. My father insisted on reading all the books first, to see what was in them, what his brother might be saying to my mother through these books. My father loved my mother through music and my father’s brother loved her through books. And then my father’s brother fell in love with my aunt. He continued living under one roof with the Jesuits, but he was more often staying under the same roof with my aunt. He no longer came to visit my mother, he couldn’t.

I don’t know what my father thought about all this at the time. I have never tried to imagine what was going on inside his head. His mind was not a place we were allowed into either, because he never showed us how he felt, only with his anger. I’m not even sure I have the right to enter now and speculate over my father’s thoughts, because he left so little for us to go on. I can remember nothing that he ever said about his brother, not a single word. I think he was like us, afraid of his brother, the Jesuit. I think my father loved my mother so much he was afraid of her talking to anyone else, even us. Most of all, I think he was afraid of the Jesuit. He was afraid he could never match his brother’s silence.

Apart from that I have no idea what he was thinking. I’m just standing in for him now, as a father.

He took us out fishing one day around that time, I remember, myself and my brother, we caught lots of mackerel and my father left a smile behind him in the boat. Or was it a smile? Maybe it was only the sun in his eyes and the effort of rowing. My brother and I both remember this word for word, my father smiling with his eyes closed and the oars squeaking, the water dripping from the oars faster than honey dripping from the spoon, and my brother was trying to slow the boat down with his hand in the water. We remember that day in exactly the same order — my father’s hands tying up the wet rope to the rusted ring in the harbour wall, the fine spray of water springing from the rope when it was tightened, the salt on our hands, the mackerel in a plastic bag still jumping and shivering inside. We were standing on the pier very hungry, our stomachs empty after coming back in off the sea, and my father was saying that he would bring us straight up for chips.

And maybe that’s why our memory is so aligned on this. Because it was the biggest surprise hearing my father say we were going for chips. As if he stopped being our father and he was going to be more like other fathers from then on. We looked at each other standing on the pier and wondered what changed him. We thought he had suddenly turned into the best father in the world. He was not the kind of man who ever bought chips, he was against all that take-away food. He wanted people to eat their food where it was cooked, where they bought it. Because our house was exactly the distance of a packet of chips away from the chipper. People coming home from the pub at night always arrived right outside our house as they finished their fish and chips, so they threw the empty wrapper into our front garden. My father said they treated our garden like a refuse bin. And sometimes he stood at the bedroom window, installed like a security camera, just to see it for himself. Every Monday morning he would go out and put all the discarded chip papers from the weekend into the bin, then he came inside to wash his hands. Once we heard him say that he was going to collect all the empty chip bags and bring them back to the chipper at the end of the year. Sometimes people threw the packet of chips into our garden even before they finished eating them and we lay in our beds thinking about the uneaten chips inside. Our garden was the cut-off point and nobody ate chips any further beyond that because they were normally gone cold by then. My father hated anything to do with chips. He hated anything to do with salt and vinegar. It’s hard to explain what made him change his mind and break all his own rules, give in, go against his own principles. Myself and my brother talk about that day and we both believe my father wanted to find out once and for all what the truth was. He wanted to find out if our house really was the exact distance of a packet of chips. So he bought chips for himself and one each for me and my brother. And it took as long to get home as it took to eat the chips.

We covered a lot of ground together in Berlin. In time, in words, in the things we said to each other, in the places we went to visit. She had not come to Berlin to see the place and go away again like a tourist. She wanted more than that. She had come looking for something in herself, I knew that. Something left unsaid. Some clue dropped in the streets. I mean, how much information is enough? When can you say you really know a city? Or a person? When can you say that you know yourself?

She was not mad about Sanssouci. We were out there briefly and she couldn’t wait to move on, it was stifling, all that opulence. She said the palace was designed like a wedding cake and she had no time for that sort of thing. On the way back she wanted to stop at the Wannsee Villa, where the Wannsee Conference took place. She came out silent.

We passed by the old airport where the Americans rescued the people of West Berlin. We saw the synagogue with the golden dome. We saw the Turkish vegetable shops and Manfred showed her the street where he was living. We saw a house that was not renovated yet, with peeling paint along the façade and balconies with junk left out on them. Bicycles. Slogans written up about freedom and justice, words that didn’t completely make sense, like free all prisoners. An end to all money. Stuff that people think up late at night. She loved that, people thinking outside the normal way of life. People with a bit of artistic rage left in them, she said. We saw an old wooden door with so much graffiti on it that it must have felt like walking into an abstract painting, like living inside a work of art. And outside on the pavement there were lots of things thrown out, a TV and a used mattress, bits of broken furniture, a sofa waiting to be sat on, an old reading lamp, bits of living without the lives.