You can be bullied by things you love.
I am a quiet father. Given to brief outbursts of emotion, followed by long spells of expanding silence. My anger is mostly self-directed. I remain in my own thoughts, detached as a book. I have my hands in my pockets, paying no attention while Rosie and Essie are climbing on a wall with a ten-foot drop on the far side. I get them down and look at the rocks below, the full terror of being a father. The fear of my own childhood?
There are things I should be telling them. Warnings, bits of stories to make them safe. Everything my mother described to me in her language, I now find myself converting into the language of the street for my own children. They are my audience. I speak with that same breathless enthusiasm in which my mother described the sea and the salt air, the tide like the hand of a thief slipping through the rocks. I pass on the tragedy in her voice when she spoke about the men who died in a lifeboat going out to rescue people from a sinking ship one night, drowning in sight of their own families on shore. I tell them about the cruel sea captain who once visited the harbour and whose ship was later taken over by mutiny. The black canvas fisherman’s hut. The white house that looks like a ship run aground on the most dangerous rocks in the world.
My words come to an abrupt stop. Everything has now been said. Those few bits of information I placed into their minds have left me drained, I feel the cold around the shoulders, I want to sleep.
The bandstand at the park was designed in a time when the country was still part of Britain. I watch Rosie and Essie running around the circular bench around the bandstand. It causes me to remember my own father, the unavoidable memory of his silence, the day he gave me and my brother plastic cameras that squirted water when you took a picture. We ran along the same bench and my father didn’t say a word. He was not the type to speak to people in the park. He spoke the ghost language, he spoke my mother’s language, he never spoke his own mother’s language. He turned his back on his people, the place where he grew up in West Cork. His soft Cork accent went missing in German, it left him open to misunderstanding.
A woman sitting on the bench close by wanted to know if I was the father of the two girls.
Are they your kids?
I smiled.
She was concerned about the way I was staring at them. People might get the wrong idea.
I know your family, she said. Your mother is German.
That’s the thing about returning home, it’s the furthest you have ever been away. The hotels along the seafront, the blue benches, the baths where I used to go swimming, the things you love turn against you, they feel snubbed and they will snub you back. You have become a spectator. The granite is not credible. The grass is implausibly green. The sea is raised up to eye level in a broad blue line, you feel cheated by what you know, you remain a stranger.
My mother was waiting for us with an apple cake. The smell of baking came rushing through the hall, like entering another country. The house was unchanged, my father was dead, but his voice was still present on the stairs, his anger, his love, his music reaching up to the roof. A man had come to take away his beekeeping equipment, his mask, his gloves, the smoker with the green bellows. The buzzing of bees remained in the rooms. The picture of my grandfather, the sailor in the British Navy, was hanging in the hallway, rescued from the wardrobe where my father had banished him.
My mother spoke to Rosie and Essie in German, they smiled and didn’t understand. They responded in English. They played outside language, they dressed her up like a child in scarves and jewellery. She held their faces in her hands – who washed your eyes?
The youngest in my family are still living at home – Greta, Lotte, Emil. Greta is working as a nurse. She takes Rosie and Essie into the kitchen to bake biscuits, I sit in the living room with my mother. I want to know more about the town where she grew up. We go over everything – her father’s business in ruins, her father dying when she was a child, her mother dying not long after, the house on the market square left empty.
My mother and her sisters went to live with their uncle. He was the Lord Mayor, hounded out of office for refusing to vote for the Nazis. Standing in the polling station holding up a rigged ballot paper, demanding true democracy. His friend, the journalist, was taken away to Dachau, back a year later no more than a shadow of himself. There was trouble on the square when somebody daubed slogans on the walls against Hitler. People suspected of putting up the anti-Hitler words were dragged out of their houses and forced to clean them up. Her uncle told her not to acquiesce, not to join up, not to be torn along, not to give the Nazis anything but her best silence.
My mother got work in the town registry office. A decrepit place, she said. Her supervisor was a man with gastric problems that required the windows to be left open, he was constantly eating boiled eggs brought into the office by his wife, the same boiled egg every morning at the same time. Her job was in registration, keeping the records on births, deaths, marriages. Where people came from, who they belonged to, surnames and dates going back centuries, many of them descendants of refugees from another time, like her own family who had fled pogroms in the low lands. She found herself constantly running up and down the stairs with the human ledger. People coming in a panic to check their ancestry.
There is a man in the town who falls in love with two sisters, she told me. The sisters live in a house on the market square, he is studying to become a lawyer, he calls to the door to collect them both and they go cycling in the country. The three of them cycling through the flat landscape. The wind in the fields is like a comb through green hair. They come to a lake and go swimming, their bodies turn gold, they spend time lying on the grass together. He watches them getting dressed, he admires them both equally, their feet, he wants to understand the mechanism in their ankles, how does all that work?
He cannot make up his mind which of them he should marry and says – if only I could marry you both.
The sisters smile their best. They all cycle back to the town and go to the cinema together. On the market square, there is more trouble, a crowd has gathered to say the cinema cannot be used by people who are Jewish. They leave. He walks them back to their house, he carries on alone through the church grounds, past the house with the fountain in the basement where Thomas à Kempis lived. On his way home, one of the sisters he is in love with comes running after him, she kisses him wildly on the street, she pulls him into a run, out along the streets through the town gates to the windmill, they disappear inside, their faces in the dark.
They hear glass breaking.
The town is full of unrest. The fire brigade is on the way to make sure the fire does not spread. There is smoke all over the market square when they get back. The following day, the student lawyer meets both sisters together and takes them to a café in Krefeld. Goods have been thrown out of the shops into the street. In the café, people make grunting noises, tapping on their cups with their spoons until a Jewish family with three children at one of the tables is forced to leave. He takes the two sisters out, leaving the cakes half finished behind them, he holds them by the hand, one on either side. They go to the opera and afterwards they sit over a drink in the foyer. He tells them that he has made up his mind, it’s only right for him to marry the older sister, the younger sister who brought him to the windmill bursts into tears and runs away into the street.
The windmill in my mother’s town has been disused for many years. It is situated right outside the medieval stronghold and the fortress wall. When my mother was born, the town was occupied by French and Belgian troops stationed in the fortress. Then it was taken over by the Nazis. Then it was taken over by the American forces stationed there after the war.
The student lawyer continues meeting the younger of the sisters at the windmill every night. He loves her, but the protocol of families forces him to marry the older sister first, the younger sister cannot jump the queue. The preparations go ahead, permissions in place, his happiness is in the windmill but his future calls, he cannot delay, the war is coming. The younger sister is left behind