A Mad and Wonderful Thing (17 page)

Every day for the next two weeks I visit the supermarket, and twice each week we go for ice-cream and coffee. I have made the effort to learn a few Italian adjectives, and I shower the proprietor in glorious praise. I am rewarded: he is serving us pure art.

At the end of the second week of our friendship, we walk the two miles to the town of Ahrensburg, where we spend the evening drinking Weissbier in tall glasses, and singing German songs with the locals. The wheat beer gets the better of me, and I think I'm Liam Clancy again. I sing three songs; one is ‘The Dutchman', which is the closest I can get to Germany. I finish off by shouting ‘
Haben Sie keine Häuser
' at the gathering, which causes some confusion and doesn't go down as well as I had hoped. Afterwards we walk to her uncle's house, where we part at the front step with a handshake and her shy smile. I walk to my room with Mila on my mind. Later, as I lie on my bed, I realise that sometimes when I'm with her I do not think of Cora.

It is a late Saturday morning, and I am halfway through my Hamburg contract. I walk through the grounds of the residence and then go to my room and wait, leaving the door unlocked. Today she will call for me, and we will go into the city for the afternoon. At midday, I hear her footsteps on the tiled hallway. She reaches the last room on the long corridor — mine — and knocks.

‘Hello,' I call out.

She pushes the door open.

‘Hello, German girl.
Willkommen
.'

She looks around the room and absorbs the scene: a novel and a Walkman on a bedside locker; a single bed; a toilet bag on a glass shelf above a corner sink; a beechwood-veneered wardrobe with no clothes showing; a single chair; a half-dozen books on the floor; and on a small table, a beer mug with flowers cut from the garden, a cup of pens and pencils, and an open notebook beside the flowers. A funnel of light reveals the woods beyond the window.

I take the Dunn & Co from where it waits on the bed, and I put it on as she watches me. She walks farther into the room, and at the table she looks to the open notebook.

‘What do you write about?'

I grimace and shrug. She looks to me — those brown eyes, those pink lips, holding the question open.

‘About life,' I answer, forced into some comment. ‘I guess,' I add, trying to tie a rope around the loose admission.

‘Is it something about me you write?'

‘Yes.'

‘What about me do you write?'

‘I write, Mila,' I say, moving to her, ‘that you are a beautiful girl.'

I raise my hand to the side of her seventeen-year-old face as I kiss her pink lips. I have never kissed a girl as tall as Mila, and the feeling is strange.

‘Irish boy,' she says to me after the kiss, and we rest our heads against each other.

‘Come on,' I say after a while. ‘Let's go.'

We ride the U-Bahn into the centre of Hamburg, and walk to the Rathaus — the city hall. It is a sandstone building, and the sandstone reminds me of the cathedral wall at home. As Mam says: isn't it funny the way the mind works? At Rathhausmarkt, there is a crowd gathered in a wide circle, and we push our way in to see a painted man juggling firesticks. We move on, wandering along Mönckebergstraße, where I stop to look at coats in the window display of Peek & Cloppenburg. Strolling through the streets of Spitaler Straße, Alsterarkaden, and Jungfernstieg, we follow a canal to the Binnenalster lake.

‘It's a big smoke,' I say to Mila.

‘This is the second-largest city in Germany,' Mila tells me. ‘Hamburg is both a city and a state. The city area is seven times bigger than Paris, and two-and-a-half times bigger than London. We have much green spaces here. Hamburg has two thousand three hundred bridges. That is more than Venice and Amsterdam if you put them together.'

Somewhere in me, it registers that I enjoy her habit for relaying facts. We walk around the lake, and we take a terrace table at a waterside restaurant.

‘How about lunch?' I ask, sliding the menu across the table. She has her hands clasped in her lap below the table. I lean across the table and take both her hands in mine, raise her hands to my lips, and kiss each of her open palms. She looks to me across the table with a face that is no longer half of anything, but all of something.

After lunch, we wander around the district of Saint Nikolai, passing the Hopfenmarkt and the ruin of the Saint Nikolai church. ‘It is a memorial to war,' Mila says. ‘It's why we leave it such as this.' I look at the bomb-damaged ruin, and then I look around to the German folk going about their business, and I think how this nation, this leading edge of our civilisation, did what they did just fifty years before. How could these people, who championed engineering, science, arts, and culture, load their neighbours onto trucks and trains, and drive them to be slaughtered? How could that possibly be?

‘Do you ever wonder, Mila, about what happened here? How did it happen?'

‘It was a bad time in history. We were controlled by mad people, crazy.'

It is true in some way, I suppose. But it was not Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels who gathered their neighbours, who loaded those trains. It was bakers, cobblers, factory workers, teachers, musicians, and carpenters. How the fuck did that happen?

We cross to Alte Deichstraße, and wander on to Speicherstadt, past vendors of rectangular pizza slices, and stalls of sandwiches topped with cold-smoked and pickled fish. We take a city commuter bus to Landungsbrucken on the River Elbe, and hold each other as we look out across the vast harbour. Below us, tourists are boarding the barges of Große Hafenrundfahrt and Fleetfahrt for harbour and canal boat-tours. I wonder how it is possible to organise so many ships, freight containers, and people. We take the bus back into the city and find a bar, the Anno 1905, across from the Holsten brewery, where we sit for hours drinking glasses of Lübzer Pils, Holsten Pils, and Franziskaner Hefeweissbier.

In the late evening we leave the bar and head towards Saint Pauli. Busloads of elderly tourists pass us, and crowds meander outside theatres showing
Cats
,
Phantom of the Opera
, and
The Little Shop of Horrors
. We slow as we read the billboards, and then we push on with the crowd into the Reeperbahn. The streets here simmer with the curious and the intent. It's as Mam says: people are strange. People travel for an assortment of motivations, and find their own fold of comfort in odd places. Among the restaurants, bars, and clubs, we pass window displays of sex-shops and brothels. Ushers entice, bargain, and plead outside strip-clubs. Girls and boys proposition passers-by for trade. We walk through the Reeperbahn like two spinsters at a wedding, inhaling every scene and occurrence. When I briefly stop to gawp into a shop window, I am separated from Mila.

A girl approaches me. She is good looking, her blonde hair is tied in a Grecian braid, her pretty face and clear skin show above the pulled collar of an American college jacket, and her arctic-blue eyes lock and hold me to her. I think she is simply being friendly and saying hello, but she is selling sex. I am embarrassed by the revelation, and quickly apologise and walk away. Homeless tramps and addicts, slumped on the pavement edge, beg with polystyrene cups offered for alms. I watch as passers-by not just ignore them, but fail to see them. I look for Mila and find her.

‘Let's go,' I say, and we walk back toward the city centre. We find a bar, and later we find a club, where we stay and dance until morning. At four-thirty, we take a taxi to the Fischmarkt. As light rises over the harbour, we wander around the stalls — the freshly caught fish, the smoked eel, the imported fruit and vegetables, and the bric-a-brac. The bus tours that passed us on the way to the Reeperbahn the previous evening have reappeared, and the bleary-eyed curious join the crowds of all-nighters and the market traders. I hold Mila close to me as we make our way through the mob. Heavy men manhandle heavy, wide pans over hot burners, where pieces of potato are fried and served with egg. Through the morning air, the smell of hot fried potato entices our hungry bellies, and we order a portion each. As day brightens, we ride the U-Bahn home to Grosshansdorf.

‘I shall come to you, Irish boy,' she says, before she falls asleep on my shoulder in the train. ‘I shall come to you.'

In Grosshansdorf, I leave a tired girl at her uncle's house, where I kiss her face and her pouting soft pink lips. I return to my room, and I lie on my bed and think again on the Nazi thing. How did it happen? How could a thing like that happen? I don't know the answer. I guess that, like it or not, this is who we are. But I do know one thing. The only way to stop a Nazi was to shoot him. That's how the battle played out. It took bullets and guns and bombs to stop them. All the peace-talking didn't work — only war saved the rest of us. As sleep comes, I wonder,
What am I doing? Where am I going?
I wonder … but I am too tired.

My summer in Hamburg passes, and it is now mid-August. Throughout my days here, I think again and again on how tyranny and massacre happen. And I think on why, at times, some people don't fight. I wonder why this happens, even when sometimes the number of the oppressed is many and the oppressor is few. Why the obedience? Is it fear? Sure, oppressors, generally speaking, have the weapons. But why be afraid of getting killed, when you're going to die anyway? I don't understand it. I try to figure it out, but I don't find an answer. Why, at the very end, as they walked in neat, ordered lines to their death, didn't the Jews throw themselves at their guards? Why not fight? What was there to lose? Why didn't slaves rise against their masters? Okay, some did. But they were the few. And why didn't the starving Irish of the famine fight for food from their English landowners? Why didn't they just fight, whatever the risk or cost? I would. I'd fight. I'd have to, because I couldn't take some bastard chaining me, starving me, or ordering me into a neat line to kill me. I'd throw myself against it. If we don't do that, then what are we? Isn't it more than just a right to fight? Isn't it a duty? But so many people don't. And perhaps it isn't fear at all, but desperate hope — a hope that no matter how bad things are, they remain somehow better than they could be, and that there is yet a chance for a reprieve and survival. Isn't that mad? Isn't hope a fucker?

These weeks here with Mila have been a blessing, but my teaching contract is finished and I am leaving. Stefan, a taxi driver, collects me from the residence. Mila stands on the grass, feeding the remnants from my cupboard to the birds. Stefan puts my two bags into the car as I kiss Mila goodbye and we hold each other. I tell her I shall come again to visit her. She tells me, again, that she will come to me.

It was Stefan who collected me when I first arrived in Hamburg and who gave me a German lesson as we drove to Grosshansdorf. Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn't give a damn, because he kept the flow going for the whole trip. ‘Well, Stefan', I said then, laughing, feeling confident and philosophical, and thinking anyway that he didn't understand me. ‘Life is just all-out madness, absolute all-out madness.'

As we return to the airport he asks, ‘So,
mein irische Freund? Deutschland, gut?
'

‘
Sehr gut
, Stefan,' I answer, and I quote a verse of a drinking song that I learned in the pub in Ahrensburg. ‘
Aber, alles hat ein Ende; nur die Wurst hat zvei
.' — ‘But everything has an end; only the sausage has two.' He takes up the tune immediately, and we motor towards the airport, laughing and singing loudly to the road.

‘
Und
…
?
' Stefan asks as we lift the bags out of the rear of the car, indicating where we came from with his head.

I nod and say nothing.

‘
Die Liebe?
' he laughs, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Love: just all-out madness.'

Line of sight

I AM CROUCHED BEHIND THE GRAVEYARD OF CROSSMAGLEN. IT IS LATE
August, and in the clear light of evening I have a line of sight down to the village square. I've had misses since Cora died. I shouldn't have tried so hard; I know that. I took risks. Delaney said it was too soon, that I wasn't right, that the planning wasn't great. But what about focus and all that stuff, I told him, and, anyhow, wasn't it all good practice? So I went ahead.

I have spent two weeks preparing for this location. I have been back and forward from gun to target three times — twice on a bicycle, and once walking with a stick and dressed in an old coat and cap. The day I walked, I borrowed a dog from the county pound in Meath, and returned it the next morning to another in Dublin. I have yet to be stopped when on a bicycle or when walking a dog. A dog can be fierce useful for unearthing any SAS units dug in and hiding; so, oddly enough, can the curiosity of cattle — a grouped long stare is a warning, and I am careful to monitor bovine behaviour. I abandoned a shoot last month when a herd of Holstein dairy cows paid long attention to a briar patch below an ash tree in a distant ditch. And I am careful, too, not to let my own location be recognised by inquisitive livestock.

I scope the pavement at the Northern Bank. Delaney had a volunteer meander there today, and I know I have a clear shot. I am ready.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man
. So says my friend Mister Hemingway. These words revisit me, and I have to chase them away and rid my mind of everything other than the senses.