The books I borrow give me a fictional character. I see myself being invented in everything I read. I am a boy unable to grow up. I spend weeks in a sanatorium. I take on the anxieties of a goalkeeper. I read about a journalist going undercover, doing dirty and dangerous jobs, washing out metal tanks with acid to demonstrate what it was like to be a migrant worker in Germany. I read the story of a writer who buys himself a new suit for a prize-winning ceremony – after accepting the literary award he brings the suit back to the tailor because it no longer fits him. And the story of the adult child who escapes from a cellar and stumbles onto the streets of Nuremberg without language, gradually claiming back the power of speech.
I grew up in a language nightmare. Between German, Irish and English. I could never be sure what country I was in. My mother was German, my father was Irish. She came to Ireland to learn English but ended up teaching my father German. He refused to speak English, she never learned Irish. At home, we spoke her language, we went to school in the ghost language, my father was a revolutionary who prohibited us from speaking English. It had the effect of turning all language into a fight, a fortress, a place of hiding. It felt like emigrating every time I went out the front door. On the street, I had to look over my shoulder to see what words I could be at home in.
The native language is referred to as – the tongue, our mouth, tongue and country, our famine mouth, the place we come from and the people gone away and the story that cannot be told in any other language.
German is the language of looking back and digging deep and starting again, the language of people who love Ireland more than their own country and sit for hours staring at the full moon over the Atlantic.
English is the language of the street, the language of rule, victory, valour, the language of rock and roll and Shakespeare and James Joyce, the language of freedom and fucking off and never looking back.
This war of languages has left me with a deep silence. I doubt the ground I walk on. I make my way around the city as though I have only recently arrived. Still arriving. Never arriving. My viewpoint is unstable, seen from multiple places at once. Everything is in contradiction, the words are full of blasphemy, I hear the grinding of translation in my head.
Does it have to do with the maritime pressure? The humidity, the cold breeze under my shirt, the empty streets with the veil of rain under the lights? Does it have something to do with shifting from the cold basement of one building to the overheated first floor of another and straight into a noisy ground-floor bar around the corner? The creaking floorboards underneath the carpet. The sound of bottles and fizz, people laughing. Something about switching between these different levels that makes it impossible for me to belong fully to either of them? The basement part of me has nothing to do with the library part of me. The bar part of me laughs at the basement part. The library part is slow to rub shoulders with the others.
Each part of me has its own silence, like maps overlapping. A different history, a different now, a different here. Different ways of being at home. Each country has its own denial and guilt and not being accepted. I remain loyal to each part of myself and true to none.
On the way home, I have the feeling that I am not fully consenting to the place where I live. The streets are refusing to dry. There is a sticky glaze on the pavement, like walking on a strip of adhesive paper. I am in a place that does not correspond to where I stand. My body has become detached from my thoughts, my feet in Ireland, my head in Germany, my voice left behind in a landscape of shadows in the west.
Back home, Helen smiles with her head tilted to one side as though everything is up close and simultaneously far away. I bring the children to bed. I make up a story for them about a wedding in the lighthouse. The bride wore a necklace of strawberries. I gather up their toys and put the books back in the bookcase, they love nothing better than piling them up in towers to sit on.
The light is left on in the hall. Helen is getting into bed. Her freckled shoulders. Her vertebrae. In the bathroom, the toothbrush falls out of my hand into the sink. I turn away and hold my face. Leaning slowly forward, I go down onto my knees and place my forehead on the floor.
Silence is not emptiness. It’s not the absence of matter. It is a solid state, full of love and language and things collected from childhood. A frozen river of emotion. My condition, though it remains undiagnosed until later, must have something to do with this silence.
It breaks out in my teeth. It begins in the front teeth and gradually spreads across the back teeth, the severity of it leaves me unable to say a word. There is no medical explanation. I have been to the dentist a couple of times, but he can find nothing wrong. He took X-rays, tapped each tooth, froze them one by one, he went as far as refilling some of the old cavities, what more can he do?
It goes away. It comes back. There is no pattern. It flares up at random when I am happy and untroubled, in the park with the lovers, at my desk in the basement, back home with everything calm, the children asleep. I curl up on the bathroom floor like a poisoned snail. My eyes fog over. My mouth is full of glass. I lie with my ear against the wood and the shining white toilet bowl rising like the bow of a ship above me. A hissing dribble of toothpaste emerging from the corner of my mouth.
Helen’s voice comes in around the tiled walls, her hand is pulling at my arm. I shake my head like a horse and get up on my feet.
You have got to stop working in the basement, she says. It makes you sick. She says she will start up a business, a drama school, a theatre, she will open a café, I need to get out of that basement.
We were in Berlin together. The city where I went to escape from my silence. Where I sang in bars at night, songs in the shadow language that nobody understood. I can reconstruct the configuration of streets, the faces in the bakery, the order of train stations. The announcements in my mother’s language, as though everyone in Berlin was related to me, a city of cousins. I can hear the train doors closing, crawling through dimly lit stations with border guards and dogs on the platforms, emerging from underground over abandoned city land, the ruins, the sand, a tree growing up through the tracks.
I stood on the platform waiting for her. I was wearing a white shirt that was too big for me. It was passed on to me, along with a second-hand great coat, by the caretaker in the apartment block where I lived. He was a big man. The shirt was so wide and loose fitting, it billowed in the breeze coming along the tracks and gave me the feeling I had stepped into the life of a much larger being. The excitement I experienced at that moment was not my size. My body mass could not hold that amount of joy. The words I had were too small to contain the magnitude of what was happening to me. I was entering an oversized future, with desires and feelings of luck that were far beyond my capacity to understand. My arms, my chest, my open neck, I was in danger of floating away inside a flapping white tent.
Helen arrived with a big belly. She carried a portable radio. Her shoes were painted over with oval handwriting. We made slow progress through the streets, reduced to the speed of an oncoming baby. We sat in the park while she ate a tub of quark, her belly was full of quark.
I brought her to a bar, she looked underage, just out of school. The barman had a knitting needle through his nose. A man with a female voice came in with a Great Dane and bent over for a joke to let the dog sniff his backside. A woman in a sleeveless leather jacket and gashes along her bare arms spoke in a slow voice to Helen, asking her what it was like to be pregnant, how can you sleep?
The city was warm. We spent the summer in a long pause, not doing very much, going to galleries, sitting in cafés, as if we were living inside a photograph waiting to move forward. Every night I stood up in bars wearing my white shirt, singing songs in a lost language. Every morning I got out the almond oil to rub across Helen’s belly with the windows open and the tree at the centre of the courtyard swaying. Her navel was a pre-historic spiral at the top of a shining dome. We were constantly hungry. She needed tons of cheese and apples and smoked mackerel. The future