Epilogue

Epilogue

He got back to Ireland about a week later, not bothering to send a forwarding address to his landlady in Dover to return his deposit to, though later, when his mood finally lightened, he reflected that it would have thrown her into one of the suppressed fits of rage for which she was so renowned. All the way, he could sense behind Tommy’s wide, innocent eyes a sense that he was going to somewhere different, somewhere lusher and more placid, as if returning to the womb or to some prelapsarian bliss from which he had been driven out by black-caped monsters. Though he could easily have afforded a taxi from Ballanasaoirse to Tom’s house, he considered it more appropriate to walk, though this meant that he would have to carry his suitcase in one hand and his child in the other. Somehow he felt the fresh Irish air cooling the sweat that inevitably glistened on his cheeks refreshing. As he drew near his adopted home he heard Plato’s honest bark bay deep-mouthed welcome, felt a twinge of melancholy as he noticed the greying hairs converging around his nose. He placed Tommy down on the ground in the hope that Plato and he would connect, but Tommy merely ran back into his arms. As he reached the door, he was just about to knock when he felt the door open and saw Tom’s face confront him, grown a little more wrinkled, his beard greying as well, and bags around his eyes, whether from grief, age, or malnutrition he could not tell. Again Schillerz’ first gambit was to put Tommy on the ground, like some olive branch or fig leaf or Queen’s pawn. This time Tom silently acquiesced by lifting him up, surprising Schilerz with his strength and energy. He looked into Tommy’s confused eyes, which darted back and forth between his father and his grandfather, and finally broke the nervous silence by saying, in a voice unfamilarly tremulous, “So this is my grandson”. He paused a while, then said, “You’d better come in”
He beckoned Schillerz to sit down and take the weight off his feet, which he did with palpable relief. Schillerz let his child run around and knock stuff the way kids that age do, while Tom went and made some tea. A few awkward minutes later he was back. He put the tea down on the table, then sat down next to Schillerz, and threw his arms around him, pressed his cheek against his shoulder. He held himself in this position silently for a while, then, as if having completed some arcane religious ritual, let go, leaned his head back and asked “Why?” as if invoking some higher power.
All Schillerz could offer was an apology that lacked any semblance of conviction. He tried to focus Tom’s attention on his grandchild and eventually succeeded in drawing Tom into conversation about him, though the tears never fully ceased.
From this tenuous beginning, they gradually managed to re-establish their relationship. Though eventually they would talk of all the things they did before Schillerz sensed that Tom was like a prizefighter who has his best bouts behind him, though, again, whether the grief was to blame or whether old age and solitude had gradually sucked the life out of him he was unaware.
Eventually Schillerz let it slip that he was going to have to go back to Germany to try and find his family, who, in his hour of anguish he felt he had to get back to. He offered provisionally to allow Tom to stay with his family in Bavaria, which Tom was magnanimous enough to view as a piece of misguided altruism rather than an affront to his patriotism. Schillerz promised Tom he would visit him at least once a year, no matter how his life turned out. Tom continued to offer him encouragement in his quest to become a diplomat, though, paradoxically, the encouragement seemed less vital in speech than in print.
Then, one day, as if the piece of elastic he had stretched to bring him to Ireland suddenly pulled him back, he found himself making his way abck through Dublin and Britain to his homeland, though he was now so deracinated that the term seemed to have lost all the connotations it once had. And yet, outside the towns, where burnt-out shells of buildings seemed to expurgate the bodies of refugees onto the street and the occupying troops displayed a mixture of Anglo-Saxon swagger and the confusion of the ignorant, there was beauty, in the snow-capped hills with their red-tiled roves, in the lambs whose mothers somehow managed to avoid requisitioning, in the cold mountain air that made Bavaria the place it was. He had chosen, for better or for worse, to go straight to his home, not made any inquiries about his family. He had to pass through all the zones of occupation and present his papers to soldiers of various nationalities, and though no-one felt the shame of the shoah more than him, he still felt insulted at being treated like a visitor from his own country. When he presented his papers in the French and American zones, he got a mixture of scepticism and suspicion, when he passed through the British zone he got a combination of bemusement and amusement, bleedin’ ’ell a spy, well I never, you know the sort of thing. He felt a perverse gratification at having made someone’s day, provided him with a story to tell the folks back in Blighty.
When he finally stepped off the train in his home town, it felt, paradoxically, less like a homecoming than his return to Ireland. After travelling through the zones of occupation it seemed tranquil and placid, as if the Stygian stench of conflict had dissapated in the mountain air. Yet he resisted the temptation to call into any of the shops and ask after his family, choosing instead to confront them face to face. As he walked up the steep, winding road towards the old family house, with Tommy trailing behind him, his teeth chattering with the cold, he reflected that there was no reason that they should not be safe. They had been members of the party, it was true, but his uncle was too old to be conscripted, and he was unlikely to have been arrested by the allies just for being a nazi. He half-expected to meet one of his neighbours on the way, but felt a twinge of dissapointment as they made the journey in solitude.
He finally knocked nervously on his door, which hadn’t been affected by the ravages of war but suffered the pangs of aging like all things. He heard footsteps on the other side, heard the door creak open, and then was confronted with the face of his mother. His first reaction was shock at what years of war had done to her, deepened her wrinkles, thinned the flesh on her cheeks, drawn black rings around her eyes. Then he felt a profound relief that she remained alive, and as she threw her arms around him and repeated his name several times, she surely felt the same. Then she looked down towards Tommy with a mixture of pride and fear, then asked Schillerz to come and see his uncle, which prompted relief on his part.
He entered the corridor and into the living room, where, to his horror, the nazi paraphenalia had not yet been removed. A picture of the Fuehrer stared down at them from above the fireplace, a swastika flag hung from the opposite wall, horrifying reminders of the creed he had once embraced. Sitting forlornly in the armchair, like a blinded Oedipus at Colonus or a crippled Rochester, Schillerz sensed in his uncle’s melancholy gaze not horror at the depradations of war but shame at the German defeat. He didn’t get up to greet his son, but beckoned him into a paternal embrace in which he held his nephew in his weakened arms, then looked down towards the confused child shambling around the room, and let Schillerz go and pointed an inquisitive look in his direction.
So Schillerz sat down, accepted a cup of weak tea from his mother, and told, as much as he could remember of the events that had occured in the last few years of his life, and as he did, he wondered whether any of the millions of people taken from their homes during the war had a stranger, more lurid tale to tell. When his uncle realised that he had betrayed the Reich, he responded not with a blustering anger but with a disdained stoicism. His mother felt only a pride that she found hard to express in the fact that she had become a grandmother, taking pride in Tommy’s every movement. Seeing the chasm that had opened up politically between himself and his family, he skirted around the broader issues of the war, and managed to keep the converstion at a civil level, it was, after all, his ambition to become a diplomat. Yet he sensed he did not belong here anymore, that this was a place where the old world was being clung onto while he wanted to build a new one. He stayed a few days in his old room, tactfully turning all his old Hitlerjugend stuff around so that, with a symbolism that seemed apt, it’s back was turned to him. He stayed for a few days, then, explaining to his mother how he could not stay here forever, decided to leave for Munich. His mother offered to take care of Tommy for him but...
His mother walked him down to the train station, while his uncle wallowed in a mire of weltschermz. When he got there, he quickly found a job relocating war orphans. He did this for a few years, teaching English on the side, then, after the formation of the Federal Republic, got a job in the foreign office in Bonn. Later he moved on to UNESCO, where he worked on projects all over Africa. He became a respected commentator in Germany and abroad on the growing inequality between the West and what had become known as the Third World.
Yet every year he always managed to find time to visit the place where the seeds of this altruism were shown, taking his son, who, as if by some genetic mutation had become used to this peripatic lifestyle, with him. He beat off the endless “Why?s” with a variety of evasions and circumlocutions ‘till eventually, when Tommy was thirteen, He and Tom decided to level with their progeny. It was during what had become a ritual of looking at old photographs of Siobhan that they ultimately decided to tell him what he must have already figured out. It was 1955, and as the new social democracies grew up all over Europe, change took place at a snail’s pace in Ireland, and how could it have been otherwise, with the country haemmoraging it’s youth and those who stayed electing to work for the establishment in the civil service or in the schools? It was something Tommy could not fail to notice, the dearth of people in their twenties and thirties, along with the lack of cars on the streets, the lack of colour in the clothes in this island that should be so fecund.
So, once again, they told the story of Tommy’s conception and birth. He had suspected all along that Tom was his grandfather but had never expected the circumstances of his birth to have been so freaky. Suspecting that parts of it were fabricated or at the very least wildly exagerated, he bombarded them with questions, all of which they were able to answer, convincing him that they were actually telling the truth. Realising this, he could say little in response but only stared at the photographs of his mother, captured forever in moments of exquistite voluptuous beauty, and cry. After this he started to form the same sort of relationship with his grandfather that his father had had. They kept coming back every year, discussed various things the way they had always done, the growth of consumerism and the military-industrial complex, the failure of Ireland to dig itself out poverty, consevatism and theocracy, though the election of Lemass gave them some hope. Tommy studied a broad-based humanities course at the University of Heidelberg, then decided that he wanted to have none of the modern world, and went to become a hippy in Goa. Schillerz persuaded Tom, whose pains had long ceased but whom old age was starting to gnaw away at - by now he was in his eighties - to write to him and convince him that he should try to do something more constructive. Though Tom had become the biggest influence on his life, as he had on his father’s, he was unable. So Schillerz, by now in his late forties, went over there himself.
One day on a beach in Calangute, where near-naked scrawny hippies wore pcychedic headscarves, Tommy was sitting down smoking a reefer with a couple of buxom Swedes and some Americans with moustaches like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. A shadow was cast over him, people asked who the grandad was, Tommy looked up and saw his father. He sat down, allowed Tommy to introduce him, prompting embarresed apologies from his friends, which Schillerz waved away as he beckoned the joint. He asked to talk in private with his son, and as the Blood red sun went down over the Indian ocean, they talked about their lives, the way they both used to with Tom. Schillerz agreed that the world was a place of horrible inequality and that, though things were improving in ways in the west, that the south was only seeming to worsen as a result of decolonistion, and the spectre of environmental destruction was starting to emerge like a dark cloud on the horizon. Yet Schillerz urged Tommy that he believed that if he could even make a few people’s lives better, his life wouldn’t have been a waste. Schillerz asked if Tommy’d ever read the Gita, surprisingly, the answer was no. A few days later, at the Anjuna flea market, he picked up a tattered, dog-eared copy and passed it on to his son. After a few weeks reflection, he thought maybe he should follow his father’s advice and join UNESCO with him. First of all, they travelled round India for a while, saw the Taj Mahal, the caves at Ajanta and Ellora, the erotic sculptures at Kajarahau, the Varanasi ghats, and the Darjeeling Himalayas.
When they got back to Bonn, an ominous letter awaited them, bearing an Irish government stamp. It seemed an estate in Ireland had been bequeathed to them. Realising the import of this message, they entered into a lachcrymose embrace, which disconcertingly seemed to upset Schillerz more than the earlier death of his mother, then resolved to go to Ireland to sort out the details of the will. Schillerz went to organise tickets and got everything prepared, Tommy spent the intervening days at an anti-Vietnam protest outside the American embassy. Schillerz said he sympathised with the protestors but his position in the UN prcluded him from joining any protests. It was ‘68, and to the tunes of Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane the same thing was happening all over the west, and the ripples of change were even starting to make themselves evident in Ireland, though with a pace as slow as the weather was soft after an April shower. He was delighted to learn that the sort of places he gestated in were closing down, albeit with not enough publicity to suggest they once existed. They weren’t sure what to do with the old house, or with Tom’s huge collection of books, but decided that, for the meantime they would use it as a summer house, over which Tom’s ethereal spirit would hang over.
Schillerz tried to guide Tommy, Virgil-like, around his new job, but after a few years realised Tommy’s heart wasn’t really in it, that he felt that as long as capitalism existed, which seemed like an indefinite period, that he would always be trying to slay the Hydra . He decided to support him in his descision to become a writer, and allowed him the run of Tom’s old house.
After a few years Tommy became one of the most respected commentators on Irish affairs. He was sympathetic to the nationalist cause in the North, but tried in vain to convince people that only liberalism would persuade the Unionist majority in the six counties to ever accept the Republic. He tried to show that the conservatism of the state was not the result of any innate hostility to progress, but an after effect of the famine which should be thrown away like a stale loaf of bread. Slowly, people began to listen to him, though he was never pompous enough to consider himself an agent of change, especially as his warnings that encouraging early marraige while banning contraception would lead to a demographic time bomb went unheeded. In the eighties, as another spasmodic haemmorage of Irish youth took place, he refused to gloat, no matter how many insults conservative Ireland threw at him. He campaigned for legalising contraception and divorce, with mixed results. In ‘85 his father retired and came to live with his son and daughter-in-law, an Irish girl ten year’s Tommy’s junior whom he had met during a protest against the visit of Ronald Reagan the year before. Schillerz had remained chaste for the rest of his life, merging a devotion to his loved one with a sincere conviction that no-one could ever match her physically. In ‘87 they sensed change coming, with the Orwellian-sounding national plan, the world conquest by U2, and the national soccer team reaching the European championship finals for the first time, but were uneasy about the form this change could take.
Schillerz snr. died in 1995, in the brief period between when divorce was legalised in Ireland and the vulgar, incongruous appelation “Celtic Tiger” emerged. Tommy reflected that this was probably just as well, that if his father and his grandfather before him had realised that the alternative to a dreary theocracy was a vulgar consumerism mixed with petty rascism and relentless economic triumphalism that they might never have stayed here. Yet Ballansaoire was living up to it’s name at last, providing a haven from the boorish plutocracy of Dublin, save for the odd, inevitable, mobile phone shop. It wasn’t all bad, he conceded, people were no longer ashamed of their identity and it was easier to get vegetarian food, yet he wondered if this was what three thousand years of Irish history finally amounted to. He still deliberates over these matters in his books, his magazine articles and his TV interviews, the years having failed to have blunted his passion. His next project is an autobiograpy, which starts with the years leading up to his conception. I can hardly wait to read it.
THE END.