Dublin Palms Read online

  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 in grief at the windmill, watching him walk away, back to the town through the entrance gate with the dawn arriving onto the cobbled streets and the roof of the church a bright pink. Glass crunching underfoot.

  In the morning, the younger sister goes to the registry office, calling up documents which have nothing to do with her but with the student lawyer she loves and cannot have. She sits in the office, reading the dates, his entry into life, his mother, his father, his family going back in time. From the documents, the people of the town appear to be scattering, the arrow of time in reverse, uncoupling, unmarrying, dead people coming back to life, children disappearing, families thinning out to the point of arrival, when they first merged into the town.

  Tears enter the records. A jealous smudge of vandalism. The letter J is found attached to the family name. The wedding never goes ahead, the names are never joined. The law student disappears. Two sisters left broken hearted, the windmill never moved.

  The garden at home had become terribly overgrown since my father died. My mother asked me to do something about it, make a start, at least. She loved the sound of the soil being turned. I brought out a chair, she sat sheltered from the breeze, by the greenhouse.

  What I liked about digging was that it had no meaning. I was happy doing something with no great purpose. It was like reverting to childhood, taking over what my father used to do. It was good to have Rosie and Essie there with me. They had their own patch of ground each to work on. They gave me the feeling that I could pass everything on to them, no need for me to achieve anything more.

  My life is limited to the vision of a father. My ideas are all designed around them. I love placing things into their minds and watching them bounce back in their crooked words. My success comes through them, I am at their disposal, I love hearing them laugh, my despair returns every time they fight. When Rosie is angry she shouts the word – anything. When Essie is angry she shouts the word – blood.

  It was not long before the spade clacked against a solid object. The sound of metal travelled up through the wood into my hands like a tuning fork. It took a while to dig up. It turned out to be an old pair of shears. They were rusted solid. The blades were fused together and could not be prised apart. The wooden handles had completely rotted off, leaving only two core metal prongs. The prongs had been moulded with a twist in the metal, presumably to prevent the handles from slipping. A flat metal cap had been welded on to the top of each prong.

  The girls came over to see what I found. With the wooden handles gone, it looked like a set of antlers. My mother laughed. Antlers, she agreed. She called me a poacher. What I’d recovered was a piece of gardening equipment belonging to my father. The fact that the handles had comple
tely rotted away seemed to date them back to when he first bought the house. The garden was a wilderness when my mother arrived from Germany. My father was too embarrassed to take it on. He felt the eyes of the neighbours looking at him through the windows. She didn’t care who was watching and went out to dig the garden herself, while he looked on from the window along with the other neighbours. It was only when he saw her digging the weeds unbothered by the audience that he changed his mind. She freed him from the fear of being judged. He no longer cared about being seen and took over the work himself, growing vegetables in neat rows, a section for flowers, new fruit trees, a patch of lawn and a place to sit in the sun.

  His garden fire is what I remember most, the smoke drifting over the boundary walls, sending a message across the world, the neighbours could hardly see a thing, they had to close their windows, it drifted through the house, it was in all the rooms, in our clothes, in our beds, it went out onto the street, the big cigar cloud of his gathered weeds smoking through the afternoon, into the night, still smouldering in the morning.

  Helen arrived as soon as her yoga class was finished. My sisters ran to open the front door and let her in. She was like a visitor from another world. They examined every inch, the black beret, her long dark copper hair, the black corduroy jeans, her light green jumper finished off square across the front. Her freckled shoulder came leaping out as she leaned forward to put down her bag on the floor in the hallway. In the kitchen, she spoke in German, remembering words she had learned in Berlin, testing them out on my mother with a contorted twist in her voice. My mother laughed and treated her like a child, slapping her on the thigh – you are a mouse.

  It’s a time of revolution. Every act contains some degree of rebellion and disobedience. There is a feeling that things are changing, civil rights, women’s rights. The art scene is full of naked bodies. Things have become less sacred, less respected. Irrelevant things are being brought centre stage, a strange truth is discovered inside objects which have previously been merely functional.

  We hear about a German artist who is using butter and felt in his work. He makes a legend of his own life story, he wears a hat to cover up the head injuries he suffered when he was shot down as a pilot in the war. He puts on spontaneous happenings, in New York he sat in a room with a coyote, in Berlin he took up a brush and began to sweep the street with an audience around him – sweeping out, he called it.

  New ways of protesting. New ways of challenging the past. In Berlin, I had been to a play where the actors did nothing but offend the audience. Everyone was being shaken awake. There was respect for madness.

  The bar where I used to sing in Berlin was full of people with new ideas. One night, a man came in carrying a sports bag with him. He didn’t order a drink. He slapped the bag down on the ground and fell on his knees. He opened the bag and took out a large raw bone. The meat had been stripped from it, straight from a butcher shop, a dog would love it. There were some red bits of flesh attached, the knuckle of a joint, like a gleaming white door handle.

  Right in the middle of one of my songs, the man held the butcher’s bone up in the air like a warning. The bar had a cobbled floor and a green wrought-iron fence around the stage, the ceiling was a backlit panel of stained glass. It was located right under the railway bridge, near the main station. Trains could be heard rumbling overhead.

  Everybody stood back.

  I stopped singing. The man with the bone was in his thirties, long hair down to his shoulders. He wore clothes that attracted no attention, a pair of worn jeans, the collar of his shirt had rounded ends. His boots had the laces undone.

  Kneeling on the cobbled floor, he held the raw bone in his hand and let out a roar. Without saying a word, he began gnawing at it, ripping off bits of pink flesh, snarling as he ran his teeth up and down along the white bone. His jaw was unshaven, there was a rage in his eyes, staring ahead into a distant place. The bar was silent, no drinks were being served, even the trains seemed to have stopped running.

  Nobody knew what to say. We were given no clear signal whether it might be reality or invention. Hard to know if the man was performing or whether he was truly hungry and couldn’t wait to eat. Was he angry, was he out of his mind, was he doing it to scare the customers, growling like an animal as he licked and tore at the remaining meat? No indication that he cared if people were watching, he seemed unaware of his audience looking on with astonishment, amusement, pity, mistrust, afraid to laugh. The space around him was clear. He might as well have been kneeling in the middle of a steppe alone, a man in war, a man holding on to his life, a man who had come across this treasured section of bone, glancing anxiously over his shoulders to make sure nobody was going to take it off him.

  Each country has its own way of breaking the silence. An artist arrived in Dublin one day carrying a huge wooden crucifix. On Good Friday, he was seen walking down the main shopping street with the cross on his shoulder. People might have mistaken it for a re-enactment of Calvary, but it was more of an art installation, a happening, he was questioning the power of the church. He leaned the man-size crucifix up against the wall of Kehoe’s pub and went inside for a drink. His art had no fear. He sat at the bar staring at his pint as though he was looking at the Atlantic.

  All that revolution unleashes a provocative force inside me. I don’t need much encouragement. I am still trying to escape the grip of my father’s rule. I am full of rebellion. I believe in nothing. I have no collective instinct. I find it hard to belong to any group, I follow no team, I even have trouble shaking my head at rock concerts.

  I stage my own private happenings. I get into a senseless confrontation in court one day over a parking fine. The fine had been issued on a quiet road with no parking signs. It was my right to park there. I had a perfectly good argument for saying the law was unjust. But it never even came to the point where I could present my case because I refused to swear an oath on the Bible. I told the court I did not believe in God, the judge roared at me – who made Dublin Bay?

  It was too much of a crusade.

  What is the point in trying to make a point? The first thing I need to change is myself, my silence, my inability to articulate or even work out what I want to say. My vocabulary is inadequate. Fighting the system, going against the establishment, breaking the hold of authority, none of those terms work for me. I speak in crowded sentences. A rush of misplaced words that don’t belong to me. I express confused emotions in public that are more suitable for letters. What I say is never memorable, just clumsy and exposed.

  I have no gift for concealment. I do my best to speak with guile, but it sounds contrived, like borrowing a scarf without permission.

  Better to keep listening.

  I am struck by a book I borrowed from the Germany library in which the main character decides to create something that will never be recognised. It describes the furious love of a man who devotes his entire life and fortune to the task of building a monument for his sister in the middle of a forest. His decision to place the structure out of sight is central to his achievement. He builds his cone-shaped construction in a silent place where it will never be seen by anyone, not even by his sister, the person for whom it has been created. It becomes a monument to what is unsaid and unseen.

  What a wonderful idea, I thought. A man compelled to squander his living energy on something that makes no sense, erecting an utterly useless edifice in a remote place, for what? For the sake of nothing? For love?

  Do something useless today.

  Helen has been encouraging me to write. All those silences can be put together into a book, she says. Things I have been collecting since I was a child. The absurd language wars, the mismatching countries, I have a needless need to put things in writing.

  I brought the rusted shears found in my mother’s garden with me when we were leaving. At home, I propped them up on the mantelpiece in the empty front room and stepped back to admire the sh
ape. Something about the fact that they could no longer be used as garden shears appealed to me. I began writing down what they looked like. Metal antlers. The skull of an impala. The eyes are missing. The skin has been torn off. What remain are the bones of a face. The rest of the carcass has been severed, possibly dragged up into a tree by a leopard.

  Why was I grasping at these comparisons? Going for the refuge of a story? What things look like instead of what they were, the suggestions they flung out rather than the material facts? Was I protecting myself from the real world? Was I describing myself? Does everything turn into a self-portrait?

  I went back to the object in front of me. Rusted garden shears. Beyond use. Nothing more than a piece of unearthed metal with no significance attached. I mistrusted even that bare description. The words were full of opinion, imposing a function on the object, it was being looked at, being conquered, given value. I tore up the few sentences I had rolled together and went back to the physical artefact itself. I stopped trying to explain where they came from or who they might have belonged to. I saw them only as the senseless shape they had become. I tied a thin piece of invisible wire to the metal prongs. I drove a nail into the wall and hung them up.

  The morning is spent in the basement conducting a stock inventory. Many of the album stacks in the storeroom have been untouched since the last count. I have introduced a stock control system adopted from a publishing house where I worked for a while in Berlin. Each item in the catalogue has a card attached to the stack with the number of copies left in stock. A person filling an order, often myself, will cross out the number and enter the new figure with the amount of sales deducted. If stocks run below a critical figure, the card is brought to the attention of the person in charge, myself in this case, so the item can be re-ordered in time to meet demand. The idea is to avoid the awkward situation of running short of either one of the components, the disk or the album sleeve, one without the other is worthless.