Every Single Minute (20 page)

She was not the kind of person who went into churches much. She had no time for God, only that couldn’t get out of the habit of using God as an expression. God Almighty. God help us. She didn’t see the point in God, but she still wanted her funeral to be held in a church and she still wanted to go into the church left in ruins, it was on the itinerary which Manfred had on the dashboard, to light a candle for her brother.

And after all that she said about her brother, she still could not help but admire her father. She loved it when people came up to her and said she was her father’s daughter. And when he died, there was such a big funeral for him, as big as her own funeral, because he was so well loved, he was the king. She was in bits after his death and started drinking like her mother. She said she didn’t see any point in drinking unless you drank too much. As a child she was used to people coming home drunk at night. Every time somebody came in late she expected them to be drunk, crashing into things, laughing or angry. She said she would never forgive her father for any of that, and still when she heard his voice on the radio it tore the lungs straight out of her chest. She tried to talk to her mother but her mother was always too drunk to listen. She found her mother often collapsed on the floor and she was left banging on the window, thinking she was dead. And then one day her mother was found dead, lying face down on the bathroom floor with all the bruises from previous falls.

At one point, Úna was driving out to the west and she realized you could switch off your own emotions like a car radio. It was like hearing nothing. Like being underwater. She discovered how to live her own life and pursue her own happiness instead of worrying about her family.

It was a bit of a surprise arriving at the church in ruins because there was so little to see. All there was left was the broken steeple, as if the war had only happened the other day. We went in and saw the shell of the church from inside, only the mosaic ceiling in one part still intact, quite well preserved, with a few cracks running through it. We saw pictures taken of the church before the war when it was still standing and nobody could have had any idea how the place would look in ruins after the war. Imagine not knowing, she said. And right beside the ruins was the new church, built as a replacement, a modern octagonal shape made up of small blue windows or blue stained pieces of glass, like a million blue squares with light coming through. So the whole church was full of blue light. It was like being inside a blue vase, no matter what the weather was like outside it was always full of blue light, blue across the floor, blue across the benches, blue across our faces.

At the door, there was a basket of apples, so you could give a donation to the church and take an apple. There was a drawing of the Madonna that she wanted to see, an oval shape of a mother wrapped around a child, keeping it warm, drawn in charcoal on the back of a street map of Stalingrad during the war.

At the candle-stand there was a small steel container attached to a chain, with a slot for the money at the top. The coins made a clinking sound as I threw them in. The tray had real candles, naked flame, not like in some churches where you pay for an electric light flickering, low voltage. So I lit a candle for her brother, Jimmy. Then I placed it into an empty space on the tray and we looked at it for a while.

I asked her was there anyone else? Did she want to light one for her parents maybe?

One for your mother and father, I said.

No, she said.

She wanted no candle lit for her mother and father, absolutely not, only her brother. It was hopeless trying to persuade her to forgive, because you could never forgive something that was done to another person, she said, only something that was done to yourself.

I’m not entitled to forgive what was done to my brother, she said.

Her brother was only a child at the time, she said. He saw what was going on. He told her what happened, in letters. He wrote to her, putting it all down on paper as though he could give the memory away to her for safe-keeping. He wrote telling her what he remembered, because she was the writer in the family and she would know what to do with the information. She carried that information with her all over the world, the story of her brother became part of her own story. And even though it was all told in her books, it was still impossible for him to get rid of the noise that remained inside his head. Ever since he was a small boy, he carried that sound like a companion walking beside him, whispering in his ear. What he witnessed would never stop, even though his mother and father were both long gone now. No matter how many letters he wrote, the memory would always belong to him.

He was at the mercy, she said.

He heard his mother was calling for help. He heard the sound of his father’s fist. He heard the sound of his mother’s face. He heard the love leaving his mother at night and never coming back, there was nothing he could do to help her. And then he hid himself in a drawer. He was not much more than four years old at the time and he was trying to get away from what he heard, they found him asleep in the drawer of the wardrobe next morning.

Would it make a difference if I had been able to tell her about the future, how things turn out? I would love to have told her that I’ve come back here to Berlin and the church with the blue light is still the same, no difference. The same blue squares of glass all around and the blue sunlight entering through them, spreading evenly across everyone who comes in. You get the impression that your hands are turning blue and silent, remembering. You come out into the brightness of the street with your blue fingers sensitive to the noise of traffic. Time has moved on a good bit into the autumn now, I would love to tell her. The city has kept going, moving ahead of you and it’s changed colour again to brown and copper and red and everything in between. Leaves curled up and crunching under your feet. Leaves spread out along the path in the park, men and women making great piles of them with wide rakes. I would love her to have seen the way the city looks at this time. Leaves in the shop windows, hanging, falling around the display of writing materials, handpicked leaves in unbelievable colours like blood red and yellow as flame, some of them still holding on to green at the edges, in among pens and diaries and leather-bound photo albums.

And lanterns.

I would love her to have seen the lanterns. One evening when I was coming through the park and it was already dark, I want to tell her, I saw about ten or fifteen of them gathered in an open space. Other lanterns came out from the trees around the edge of the park to join in with them. They were mostly orange, but other colours as well. It made me think of a luminous underwater creature, shifting and changing shape constantly. That’s how I would describe it to her. And then I saw that they were all mothers and fathers with children. Some of the lanterns turned out to be faces lit up by lanterns. One of the lanterns broke away and started moving quickly up a small hill with another lantern after it. Until they both came back and joined in with the main group again. Then the entire collection of lanterns began moving very slowly towards me. There must have been about thirty or forty of them in all, I would say, getting closer and closer until I was surrounded by lanterns, all singing as they passed me by.

That would have been good for her to see.

I would love to have told her some more optimistic things. Would that have made a difference to the way she thought of me, the general impression that she took away with her at the end of her life?

Your daughter will be all right, she said to me.

It’s good to remember her saying that. She was guessing at the future in her absence, telling me not to worry so much, things would take care of themselves, you can’t plan out everything in advance. As regards what she thought of me, I don’t know. She was free to assume anything she liked, she had that gift. And I could no more influence her view of me than I can influence what other people think of me. It’s not in my hands to shape the story that people remember.

All I could think of telling her in Berlin was that my brother continues to keep the house where we grew up intact, the same front door, the same windows, everything unchanged. The pictures, the books, the hallway table, even the mice running along the floor, they still have the same entry-point under the stairs. If I was living there, I told her, I might have ripped everything out including the old plumbing, that’s me, I have the tendency to renovate. My brother is happy to live with his childhood around him.

Everything is there, I told her. The view overlooking the back gardens, the apple trees, the granite walls with the snails hiding in the ivy, the back gate that never closed properly. Even the sky is unchanged, still shaking with the bang of my father’s fist on the table. And the sash window that broke one night in a storm. My father came rushing into the bedroom full of anger and I thought he was coming to punish me, but he was only coming to close the window, which was rattling. It was the days of wood and putty, the sash frame was rotten, and when he tried to close it down, the bottom of the frame came apart in his hands like a piece of fruit cake. The glass was smashed. My father had to find a way to cover the gaps, so he switched on the light and looked around the room for the nearest thing at hand. In the corner of the room there was an old atlas, a big rolled-up school atlas which he kept from the time he was a schoolteacher in Dunmanway. He rolled it out and nailed it up against the window frame. It’s a temporary solution, he said. Go to sleep. So that’s how I fell asleep, looking at the world from my bed, with my back against the wall. All the anger was outside. The branches of the trees throwing shadows onto the world and the wind flapping across the oceans.

I never thought it was possible to live without anger in Ireland. Maybe my father was also like the King in
Don Carlo
. He was full of love and guilt and fear of losing his power. But he was not trying to kill me. He was just very sensitive to noise, that’s all. Even the phone would make him jump. I don’t know what made him like that, maybe he was still listening out for all the things that scared him, things from his own childhood perhaps, his own father missing. He was scared by the noise of children. It was like something he couldn’t fix, like water hammer. He didn’t know what to do with children making noise. And the only thing you could do with water hammer was to rip out the whole plumbing system and start again from scratch. He loved children in his own way. He was good at remembering birthdays. He was good at buying mouth organs and geography magazines and teaching the rules of chess. But he couldn’t take any of us running around the house, bouncing on beds or jumping down three steps at the bottom of the stairs, it would make him leap up from his chair and the book would fly out of his hand, we were worse than water hammer.

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.