Every Single Minute (14 page)

We arrive at the restaurant a bit late. Through the car window I can see the people inside, sitting around the table. The white tablecloth. The faces waiting for us. Some of them stand up when they see her. Because she’s here now, they can see the wheelchair on the pavement. They can see her being helped out of the car by Manfred. She has taken off her cap, so her head is bare, that’s how they recognize her now. She’s looking all around, at the front of the restaurant, at the tables outside, at the name over the door. She wants to know where she is. What kind of street is this and how busy is the traffic and what else might need to be remembered? She doesn’t bother putting on her coat to go from the car into the restaurant.

She asks Manfred would he like to join us for lunch.

No thank you, he says. He has sandwiches made up by his wife and he’ll have them in the car.

Your little helper made your sandwiches for you, she says.

She can be like that occasionally, Úna. She can snap from time to time, I’ve experienced that. The angry side in her breaks out with no warning. She can be mean, for the sake of it, not letting anyone get away with a thing.

What would you do without your little helper? she says to Manfred.

Ah, come on, Úna, I say to her. Give it up. You can’t call his wife a little helper.

Manfred doesn’t take offence. He must think your little helper is what you call your wife. We can’t stop him calling his wife a little helper.

My little helper, he says. At the moment, my little helper is doing a doctorate in waste management. What will we do with all the baby nappies in the world? This is what she is studying, he says. So now I am her little helper for a while, Manfred says. Thank you for your kind invitation, he says, but Olga is still the best little helper for sandwiches.

Maybe Úna is disappointed that Manfred has turned down her invitation to be part of her lunch party.

I can be a bit of a bitch sometimes, she says.

Ah, you’re not that bad.

A right wagon, Liam. God forgive me.

The Paris Bar is where some people say Marlene Dietrich gave her farewell party. One of her parties at least, Manfred says. Before she moved to Paris. She went to Paris to die in private and then she came back to be buried in Berlin, the round trip, Úna calls it. She’s making the same round trip from Dublin to Berlin and back. Manfred has given her all the information about Marlene and he offers to drive us to the graveyard where she’s buried. It’s not very far, he says. It’s a lovely place, a quiet city graveyard, with red-brick walls. After lunch, maybe. He has brought quite a few people there to put little stones on Marlene’s grave, a train ticket, maybe, with the name of the town they come from. Only last week he tells us he brought an old man there to sit on a bench under the trees in silence.

I don’t need to go to a graveyard now, she says.

Thanks, Manfred, I say on her behalf. I take the wheelchair and push her into the restaurant, then she turns to me.

Why does he want to bring me to a graveyard?

He’s doing his best, Úna.

A farewell lunch. A small group of people coming to see her off at the Paris Bar. Friends and other writers she knew. A journalist. Somebody from the embassy. They’ve organized this lunch out of courtesy, to wish her well.

They are translating the menu for her.

Asparagus soup.

They talk as if there is nobody else at the table but her. They turn towards her and don’t even see each other. She’s looking into everybody’s eyes, blinking a lot, smiling, nodding. She draws everyone out of themselves. Each person feels alone with her, taking turns to tell her things that will interest her.

They. Why am I saying they? We.

We are trying to cheer her up. Somebody says Berlin is a good place to radiate from. It’s right in the middle of everywhere. One of the best places in Europe to think of going to other places from. Like Poland. Warsaw. And Kraków, they say, even further east. St Petersburg. Moscow. Trans-Siberia. It’s only a matter of picking where you want to go. Lots of people don’t think any further. They’re telling her it’s a good place to get the overnight train from. And some of the trains from the east are battered by hailstones, they tell her, with white scratches along the roof, from the fierce weather. You can see the weather written on the outside of the carriages, as if it’s written in Cyrillic.

She goes silent. All that talk of travelling has made her go into a dream. She loves nothing more than hearing the names, the further away the better. She says it’s like Castlebar translated into Polish. Ennistymon. Milltown Malbay. Imagine Ballyvaughan in Russian. Imagine reaching Fanore in Chinese. Imagine taking the overnight train and waking up in County Clare, at Spanish Point, with the sea at your feet.

I’ve never been anywhere like that, she says. I’ve never even been to Kraków. Or St Petersburg. I’d love to go.

She tells them about travelling with Noleen. All the way down through Macedonia and Albania.

I remember a small town, she says, where a man climbed into a walnut tree for us. His feet were in the branches, shaking down the walnuts. Big green leaves like big green donkeys’ ears around his head. The man said we looked like sisters and we called each other sisters, she says. Eating walnuts like sisters. I remember his wife standing by with a basket in her arms and fruit flies around her head. At night we slept like sisters. I remember a cockroach running across the floor and we laughed because Noleen said it looked like he was embarrassed to be seen.

They tell her about the restaurant. They explain why it’s so famous and why people wanted to be seen there before everything began to shift after the wall came down and people found new places in the east of the city to be seen in. It’s a has-been restaurant, so they say, but some people still go for nostalgia. The tables are close together, the waiters are older men, wearing white aprons down to the floor. There’s a cashier. Have a look at the cashier, they say. So she looks around and smiles at the cashier, a young woman wearing a white blouse sitting at a desk, high up. It’s like a pulpit, she says. Not really a pulpit, more like an open-deck cubicle, a half cubicle, with a half door and the cashier sitting down, but yes, like a pulpit, too, if you like. The waiters shout numbers across the restaurant to the cashier and the cashier knows what everybody is eating.

They remember cashiers like that in Dublin. Cubicles for cashiers no longer in use. They remember all kinds of other things that have gone out of existence, like sums done on the back of brown paper bags in pencil. Things that belong to the past that you might be more likely to see if you get on the overnight train.

White asparagus, she says.

It’s a big thing here in May, they tell her. White asparagus.

White asparagus soup.

They watch her cutting the asparagus. Her hand shakes a little as she chases a piece of it around the bowl, until she traps it with her thumb and lifts the spoon up to her mouth. And while they’re talking to her, she looks around at what the others are eating, comparing what they’re having to what she’s having. She reaches over to take some French fries off my plate and throws them into her soup. French fries floating in the asparagus soup.

Why am I so hungry? she says.

It’s great to see her eating. She’s ordered lamb cutlets, and when they arrive, she picks them up and eats them by hand, holding them by the bone. She doesn’t care who’s looking. She’s on a lot of steroids and that gives you a horse of an appetite, she says.

We’re taking our time, sitting around the table at the Paris Bar, talking about history. About the war, going back to the Nazis. The whole twentieth century happened in Berlin, so they’re saying. I wish I could remember some of the stories they were telling. But I was not fully paying attention, to be honest. Sometimes I get left behind. It’s like being at school and I’m not concentrating and they have already moved on, talking about Northern Ireland when I think they’re still talking about the Second World War and the Nazis. Sometimes the words used for one part of history match in with those for another part, no difference, only the names of places you have to watch out for. And the personalities. Some words, of course, you can’t mistake. You know it’s Ireland by the way they say let’s hope so. That narrows it down. It’s still in the future, at least. Or maybe only just in the recent past.

Whatever it is, they’ve lost me. I can’t pick up the trail and I’m left thinking about irrelevant things. Personal matters that I have told her about and that have absolutely nothing to do with the people around me at the table, they wouldn’t be interested.

I’m still trying to work out what was going on inside my own family. What went on after we saw my aunt and my father’s brother coming out of the hotel in Cork. We had no explanation for it. We had the facts but we had no story, no context. There was a lot of talking behind closed doors. And the Jesuit, my father’s brother, was no longer coming to our house with sweets in his pocket.

We were told he was on retreat. He was having a crisis in his life, that’s all my mother would say. I think she wanted to tell me more but she would not allow herself. I was afraid that she might have told my brother more than me, or he was better at picking things up, and he was keeping it all to himself. She told me to pray for my father’s brother because he had difficult decisions to make. He had to make up his mind whether he was still living under the same roof with the Jesuits or staying under the same roof with my aunt. We got no further explanation at the time, it was not something we were allowed to ask any more questions about.

I’m not sure my mother even had an explanation to give herself. She was left trying to figure out why my father’s brother was not coming to see us any more. Had she done something wrong? I had no idea why my mother was so upset about all this. My aunt didn’t come to the house any more either, on her own or with the Jesuit. We were like a family left behind. My mother kept trying to contact him but he was out of reach. She left messages, inviting him out to the house as before, she was ready to welcome him back like a real Jesuit and put him at the head of the table with a cake in the middle, his favourite coffee cake, but he wouldn’t come. Maybe he was afraid of my father. Maybe he thought my father would subject him to interrogation in the front room, what was he doing coming out of a hotel in Cork arm in arm with my aunt right in front of us when he was meant to be a Jesuit?

My mother was unable to live without knowing. So one day she decided to go and see my father’s brother face to face. I don’t know if my father was even aware of her going to visit his brother on her own. She went on the bus, two buses in fact, to get to the red-brick house where the Jesuits lived under one roof together. She had a long walk up the drive with the windows of the building looking out over the person arriving. She said she thought she saw my father’s brother watching her from one of the windows, but she didn’t want to wave at him in case it was another Jesuit. She walked up the granite step and rang the bell beside the brown door. It takes a while before one of the Jesuits appears. You can hear doors opening and closing and footsteps coming along the corridor. And when a Jesuit finally comes, it’s the wrong Jesuit. He let her into the reception and went to find the right Jesuit, my father’s brother, our Jesuit, wherever he was, so that took more time and she was left sitting there listening out for doors opening and closing, hoping it was him, the Jesuit in our family.

She was told that my father’s brother was busy, in prayer. He could not to be disturbed. The Jesuit was very polite, as always, speaking as if he was only allowed to use the least amount of words. He said it would be a while before our Jesuit was available, so perhaps it might be better to come back another time.

My mother said she would be happy to wait.

I think it might have been an hour, maybe more. They didn’t offer her anything, no tea and biscuits, only the same Jesuit coming back to see if she had gone home yet. She was sitting with her coat still on, in the small reception room, surrounded by magazines about the missions and the new schools being built. The same room where I had to meet my father’s brother once or twice, for causing too much trouble at home, and once more to discuss sexual matters. Something to do with a man and a woman. That’s what it was called in our family, things that happened between a man and a woman, even though it was too embarrassing to speak to my father’s brother about anything at all, he didn’t really have much to say about any man or any woman and neither did I, so we left it at that.

My mother said she was not leaving until she had spoken to him. And when he finally came to see her, he sat down on the far side of the room with his hands still in prayer on his knees, staring at the floor, as if she was not even in the room and it was only the holy-order magazines left.

Just tell me, my mother said.

She wanted to know the truth, that was all. She wanted to hear it from his mouth. He looked up at her and thought for a long time about what he was going to say, carefully selecting his words. But then he told her nothing, just made it clear to her that he was not going to answer any of her questions. He was even more full of silence than ever before, if that’s possible, to be full of something that does not exist. He had nothing whatsoever to say to her. He was used to people confessing everything to him. He was not going to turn around and start confessing everything to my mother. She had the wrong Jesuit. What he was thinking had nothing to do with her. It was none of her business what went on between a man and a woman.

It’s my business, that’s all he said.

Then he got up and left her sitting there empty-handed. He didn’t shake hands or embrace her. He just disappeared. She came home by the same long driveway with the well-kept lawns and the windows staring at her, two buses, the same journey in reverse with no explanation. And maybe that was the explanation.

There’s a lot of art on the walls at the Paris Bar. Mad paintings, all the way around the entire restaurant. A light-box attached to the ceiling, illuminated in different colours with the words ‘stand still and rot’. I mean, the art is pretty out there, for a restaurant. Where people are forced to eat. There is a large black-and-white photo of a man and a woman naked, in their twenties, having sex. The woman has the man’s penis in her mouth. And this other couple are having their meal right next to it in silence, paying no attention whatsoever to the man in the photograph looking down with an unhappy expression on his face while the woman is leaning sideways over him with her knees apart. As if it’s the most normal thing in the world for a man and a woman to have their lunch beside the man and the woman having sex, like it’s all part of the same thing and you don’t have to keep staring at it.