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The Speckled People
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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ix In his memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton, an Irish writer and the son of a German mother and an Irish father, tells the story of an Irish German family in Dublin through the eyes of one family member, a young boy. The following excerpt recounts the Christmas visit of his German aunt, now living in Salzburg. I couldn’t breathe very well. My shoulders were going up and down trying to get air. My mother stroked my head and listened to the howling in my chest. She prayed that I would get better. She smiled at me and said everything would soon be fine again, because her oldest sister Marianne was coming with her daughter Christiane. And Tante Marianne was very good at helping people breathe. She helped people in Salzburg when it was hard to breathe. For days and days my mother was cleaning the house. She polished the stairs and every piece of wood in the house was shining. She put fruit in a bowl on the table and baked a cake.Tante Marianne was going to get my room. It had no wallpaper any more, only pink plaster and some long cracks, but my mother said it looked clean and friendly, and that’s all that mattered. And as soon as Marianne walked in the front door, she would see the old oak trunk that came from their house on the Buttermarkt and think she was at home. The Speckled People Hugo Hamilton My mother put on her blue suit with the big white collars. She put the big number 4711 on her wrists and wore the green Smaragd snake. We put on our best clothes, too, with no blue elbows, and kept looking out the window until Tante Marianne and Christiane arrived in a taxi with suitcases.Then my mother dropped her apron on the floor of the kitchen and ran all the way along the hallway smiling and crying at the same time.Tante Marianne was smiling and crying, too, as they embraced and stood back to look each other up and down. “Ja, ja, ja, ” they kept saying. And then,“Nein, nein, nein. ” They could not believe their own eyes.They shook their heads and wiped their tears and embraced each other again. Ja, ja, ja, and nein, nein, nein, and ja, ja, ja, until Tante Marianne turned around to look at us. She knew our names from letters and photographs, but she had to kneel down and look at us properly,one at a time. She knew everything. She knew about Maria’s picture of my mother with the arms going all around the walls. She knew that I slapped the schoolteacher. And she knew about the mashed potato on the ceiling. My father carried in the suitcases and smiled at everyone. Christiane talked to us and Tante Marianne talked to my mother as if they couldn’t waste a minute.They went through each of the names one by one—Ta Maria, Elfriede, Adam, Lisalotte, Max, Minne and Wilhelm, and all the children, as if they had to travel around Germany in their heads until every question was asked and every story was told. My mother had to hear everything twice and clapped her hands around her face as if she could not believe what she heard. Tante Marianne brought new perfume into the house. Everyone wanted to be close to her all the time and sit beside her at the table. Maria followed her everywhere. My mother and Tante Marianne could not be separated either, because they kept talking, even when they were not in the same room. Even when Tante Marianne was upstairs and my mother was in the kitchen, they kept remembering things out loud, calling up and down the stairs as if they were at home again in the house on the Buttermarkt square. Tante Marianne called her Irmgard. We still called her Mutti, and it was like having two mothers in the house, because they had the same teeth and the same eyes and the same hair. They had the same words and the same way of laughing out loud until the tears came into their eyes.They had the same way of peeling an orange in strips along the x HUGO HAMILTON [3.90.187.11] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:34 GMT) side and the same trick of cutting the peel into the shape of teeth.Two mothers playing the monster with...