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write in German. My mother’s tongue gave me no protection. It was like pointing at myself. I became the accused. I took on the banality of somebody waiting to be caught and brought back to face trial. Normal words like bread and butter were extremely childish and at the same time loaded with pre-existing meaning. Milk was no longer milk. I could not use the word ground, nothing to do with land, territory, domain, home, belonging.

      It may have been the mashed potato, it scalded my front teeth. I knew what was coming and didn’t want my children to see me flinching. I got up from the table and left the house. Helen asked me where I was going but I had no idea. I walked as far as the lighthouse, it felt as though I was biting granite, my teeth scraping at the pier wall. Then I walked in a great hurry back to my mother, asking her if she had ever seen Hitler.

      Once, she said.

      Where?

      Düsseldorf, she said.

      She was in a department store looking at fabrics, feeling for quality, when everybody suddenly rushed out the door onto the street. He’s here, somebody shouted. The wind sucked them out, shop assistants included, leaving the till behind unguarded. She was the only person left inside. The crowd was lined up along the street, people on their toes, straining to see over shoulders, leaning in the direction where the cavalcade was expected to appear. The buildings were decorated with swastikas, everybody waving flags.

      My mother used the expression – torn along.

      Inside the abandoned department store, my mother said she felt unsafe. She was afraid they would accuse her of stealing. She went outside and saw a small woman who had just left the shop with a broad new hat. The cavalcade passed by with Hitler in the back of an open-topped car. A small man with a modern moustache. It was known that he had a warm smile and his eyes had the ability to look inside each person.

      The moment was brief, my mother said. She stood at the back of the crowd. She hardly knew it was Hitler, only that the woman in front, wearing the wide-rimmed hat, not paid for, the label was still attached, turned around with great excitement in her voice and said – did you see him?

      After the cavalcade passed by, everyone went about their business. The woman with the new hat walked away down the street. Another woman crossed the street wearing a new tweed coat, the gifts of Hitler. My mother was working in Düsseldorf by then, in an employment office, she had some money, she went back into the department store to buy gifts for her sisters, the two eldest ones were already married, things they needed. She said it was a time of high fashion. A time you could not easily trust men. Most of them were in the Nazi party. Her boss was a senior Nazi member, he was married, always asking her to go for a drink.

      Walking back home, the granite bite in my mouth slowly began to let go. Nothing, to my mind, can be as intoxicating as the grip of denial being released. The enormous energy that goes into refusing the past comes flooding back in a wave of peace once I face up to it. It is not possible to choose my history. I cannot favour one part over another.

      They were all asleep when I got back. I made sure the children were covered. Helen woke up, there was a sleep cloud of warm air around her neck. I whispered to let her know I was going to stay up and listen to some music. I had borrowed a set of headphones from work. I put on one of the albums from the basement catalogue. The accordion player from Galway with a cigarette in his mouth gone to America, a jig called the Rambling Pitchfork. Three, four times in a row I played it.

      The Rambling Pitchfork.

      The black flags make it impossible to ignore what is going on in the north of Ireland. They are there to remind everyone of people on hunger strike. Hunger has a deep meaning in our country. In some places, the flags are accompanied by the faces and the names of the men on their fast along with the name of the camp in which they have been imprisoned. They look thin and gaunt, their hair long, their eyes sunken, one of them had been elected to parliament in London while in prison, his face bore a smile from an earlier time.

      There was a letter published in the paper, sent by the mother of one of the hunger strikers to the prime minister in London. It was requesting a meeting to explain why her son was refusing food and water. It described what it was like for a mother to see her child slowly dying. The prime minster was a mother herself, she wore a blue scarf around her neck, but her response to the mother of the hunger striker was unequivocal, she saw no need for compassion, a crime was a crime. The men on hunger strike could not be regarded as political prisoners. They were asking for too much, a letter a week, one visit a week, the right not to wear prison clothing.

      We should have brought the bowl, Helen said.

      We had a stainless-steel bowl at home which was used whenever they were sick. It was also used for baking and washing lettuce and other things like soaking beans and chick peas. From time to time, Rosie and Essie wanted it for playing with water, a doll’s bath, teddies dripping and shrunken. It was a bowl that could be used for many things in the family, though we generally called it the sick bowl. It was dented in a couple of places and had the sound of a bell.

      Get the sick bowl.

      I grew up alert. Listening like a soldier in perpetual war. When I heard the voice of a child, I woke up running, a hundred doors opening, my bare feet along the green carpet, bursting into the bedroom holding the bowl in one hand, Rosie too weak to stand, waking up from a sick dream. Her forehead wet. Her face white. My other hand keeping back her hair, rubbing her tummy – you’re OK, it’s all out now, all gone. Helen coming with a warm facecloth, then everything was fine again, they eventually went to sleep again as if nothing had happened.

      Was

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