Dublin Palms

I hear her telling her mother in Canada that we are settled down now. She says I have a good job in the music business. I am responsible for signing up new talent. She says she has a part time position teaching drama at her former boarding school. She has begun to teach yoga classes, we keep the front room clear of furniture. She says my brother is a good carpenter, my sister Gabriela gave us a porcelain teapot. I have a little brother who works in a bicycle shop nearby. My sisters sometimes come to look after the children.

We are living on the main street. On the bus route, same side as the veterinary surgery and a grocery shop, further down a pub on the corner. The house next door has been turned into a guest house. A white, double-fronted building with a terracotta path running up the middle and patches of lawn on either side, each with a cluster of palm trees at the centre. The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. They are not real palms. A non-native variety pretending to be palm trees. They manage to grow well in the mild climate, up to the height of the first-floor windows. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.

The people upstairs are laughing again. They make me conscious of my life downstairs. I pull the curtains. I put the books back. I check to make sure the girls are asleep. I lay out their clothes for school in the morning. It all seems to give the people upstairs more to laugh at. They laugh until it comes to the point where I can’t help laughing myself. And as soon as I laugh, they go silent. I find myself laughing alone. I hear them putting on music. They always play the same track, which becomes a problem after a while only because I like the song myself. Whenever I want to play it, they get there ahead of me. The song I love becomes my enemy.

I hear Helen’s footsteps on the tiled kitchen floor. I can see the shape of her body in the sound of her shoes. Her straight back, her arms have no weight in them, she has long hair, apple breasts. I hear the silence as she moves to the carpet for a moment and returns to the tiles.

At night, the dreamy passengers on the upper deck of the bus can see right into the house as they pass by. They catch sight of us for a fraction of a second, we sleep on the floor in the empty front room, the mattress pulled in from the bed, with the fire on and the curtains left open. The passengers see nothing, only two people with yellow bodies staring at the ceiling, remembering things.

She talks about growing up in Birmingham. The garden around her house with the monkey-puzzle tree, her family packing up and leaving for Canada. The farewell party was held in Dublin, the landing of her grandmother’s flat was filled with suitcases. Her aunts and uncles came back from England and France to say goodbye. Everybody laughing and talking about Donegal and Limerick and Carrick-on-Shannon, then everybody in tears when one of the uncles sang her mother’s favourite song, how the days grow short, no time for wasting time, who knows when they would be in the same room again.

Normally it is the child who leaves the mother behind, but Helen got switched around. She found herself watching life in reverse, seeing her family off at the airport in Dublin, standing with her grandmother at the bottom of the escalator waving and her mother unable to turn around to look back. The streets were wet with recent rain, the lights reflected on the surface. Men with collars up going across the bridge, the river not moving much, only the neon glass of whiskey filling up and going dry again. Two buses back to the empty flat, staring out the window all the way. Her grandmother lit a fire and drank some brandy. They sat face to face in the bath, their eyes red, their legs dovetailed, two girls, twice removed. The pipes were creaking, a finger drawn through the steam on the tiles, flakes peeling off the ceiling. The soap was oval shaped, it smelled like smoked mackerel and cough mixture.

The term for emigration in the native language is the same as tears. An emigrant is a person who walks across the world in tears. Going in tears. Tearful traveller.

Some weeks later Helen was called out of boarding school when her grandmother was taken to hospital. Her uncles came back once more, they brought three bottles of brandy, one to be confiscated by the nurses, one to be drunk on the spot, the other to be hidden for later. When everyone was gone again, her grandmother tapped on the bed and told Helen to get in. That’s how they fell asleep. Her grandmother died during the night beside her, the hospital was quiet, only a thin extract of light left on in the corridor and the nurses whispering.

Long after the buses stop running, she sits up and talks with her back turned to the fire, her spine melting like a wax plait. Her eyes are full of departure. All that travelling in tears. All the packing. All that leaving and arriving and leaving and re-arriving and leaving all over again.

She tells me how strange it was to visit her family in Canada for the first time. In the summer, when school was finished, she found herself going home to a place she had never been to before. Her father picked her up from the airport in Toronto. In the crowd of faces waiting behind the glass, he looked so international. The distance made her shy in his company, like being in a doctor’s surgery, he spoke in a series of directions, driving out of the car park on to the main highway. His freckled hands on the steering wheel as they passed beneath a huge billboard of a woman in a swimsuit holding a cocktail with a pink umbrella, the seams where sections of the poster were joined together crossed her legs, it took a full minute to go by. At a service station he bought some root beer, a medicinal taste that never occurred to her before.

People speak in big voices, she says, it’s all straight roads, endless skies, no fences, her eyes were too big, too open for the brightness of the sun. The shadow cast by a tree was a deep pool on the lawn.

The strangest thing of all was seeing her family waiting on the porch, as if they were practising being at home. Everything was the same as before in Birmingham, the furniture replicated in the same order, only the view outside the windows had changed. Her mother’s welcome was exaggerated, warmer, more pressing, a hurried photograph taken of them all together in the living room, the family complete again. She sat duplicated beside her mother on the chaise longue, their hands clasped, their knees aligned, her brothers and sisters standing along the back in a series of family variations.

Her mother is full of shrug. She shrugs off what she left behind by turning her head aside in a mock-expression of disdain, closing her eyes and placing her chin on her shoulder. She laughs and repeats a family phrase brought to Canada all the way from Limerick – when I think of who I am.

They never say the word emigration.

The town is situated on a bluff, overlooking Lake Huron. Designed in the shape of a large wheel. It’s like a clock, Helen says, with streets radiating out from the courthouse at the centre. She laughs and tells me her family live inside a clock, facing the sky. It is reputed to be the prettiest town in Canada. You can see the sun going down twice. Once at shore level and then again if you run fast enough up the wooden steps to the lighthouse, you see the same red sunset repeated, she says, the clock waits, you get a second chance.

She speaks like a postcard. Her voice is full of streets I don’t know. The town is her invention, even the name sounds made up – Goderich.

I’ll bring you there, she says.

It has the biggest salt mine in the world. Sifto Salt – the true salt. Our salt on every table, she says. Our salt going all over Canada in winter to clear the ice off the roads. Carried on big salt ships across the Great Lakes to Michigan. The mining company has erected a shrine at the edge of the town, a glass pyramid with a faceless salt figure inside. It’s the height of a young woman, she says.

The Salt Madonna, they call it.

Her family home looks right over the mine. You see the lights at night, she says, like a carnival down there. You hear the salt loading arm swinging across in your sleep, voices shouting, trucks reversing, trains like owls coming to take the salt boulders away. And sometimes, she says, the blasting underground will send tremors up through the floor into your bed like an electric current. It’s a city underground, a thousand feet down, going out for miles underneath the lake. Giant trucks, two-way traffic running through halls with white cathedral ceilings, bright with arc lights shining. The air is so dry you can’t even sneeze. Your lungs crack as you breathe. The giant equipment used for extraction is left buried down there in empty salt chambers when it stops functioning, no rust, nothing ages. Her father gave her a stick of salt from the mine, she keeps it in a small case along with her letters.

The sky was beginning to clear up. I got the children ready to go out. I buttoned up their chequered lumber jackets, sent over from Canada, one blue, one orange. They both had colds, red cheeks, Essie coughed like the bark of a seal. We slipped out past the front room with the yoga session in progress, ten women in a circle with their eyes closed, breathing and humming. Helen is an actor, good at playing the part of an instructor.

We turned left, past the guest house with the palm trees, past the veterinary surgery, the grocery shop, we crossed the road by the eucalyptus trees. Along the seafront, we met the veterinary surgeon coming back with his children. His name is Mark, I know him from school, a bit older, he married a French woman, his children call him Papa. My children call me by my first name. I don’t encourage them to say – Dad. Other children at school think I am their older brother.

The sea was calm. Some cargo ships in the bay waiting to be loaded. Close to the horizon, there was a bright section of water where the sun shone through the clouds. For me, there is an abnormal emphasis on those fragments of light, on the mood of the coastline, on the rocks moving underwater. The seafront is full of sand and sex and shivering and wet bathing costumes pooled on the ground. Everything is familiar, the granite pier, the lighthouse.

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 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 completely 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.