The German
Mark Keane
I was up in Curley’s, around six o'clock. The Angelus had just finished on the radio. I took a good pull on my pint. Curley foostered behind the bar, picking up glasses and putting them back on the same spot, moving boxes of matches an inch to the left or the right, all the time worrying that there were only three of us in the pub. PJ Fahy stared at the dregs of his pint while Frank Sheehy nursed a Club Lemon, gone flat and warm from the heat of his hand. The door of the pub opened, and in came the German.
He wasn’t much to look at; a scrawny streak of misery. Not a man to put in a good stretch footing turf or digging a ditch or building a lean-to on a hayshed. He had on a pair of baggy green trousers, a ratty old shirt and leather jerkin, all manner of leather bracelets around his wrists, a leather necklace too. And a bag, a type of handbag, across his shoulder.
You should have seen the puss on Curley when the German walked in. Scrunched up with suspicion and doubt as he sized up the stranger. But he was a customer, and Curley didn’t turn away trade. The German asked for a bottle of Heineken, as that was his drink. I should know as I ended up buying him many the bottle of Heineken. He never returned the favour. Not that he was mean, not like Curley who was as tight as a duck’s arse in water.
The German became a regular in the pub, always sitting at the table by the door. He’d dig around in his bag, pulling out pouches and packets. Then, he’d start rolling cigarettes and make a batch of ten or twelve, enough to last the night. He never bought cigarettes from the machine but he wasn’t slow to accept a Major or Sweet Afton from one of the other smokers.
Curly didn’t like to see people enjoy themselves. You were there to spend money and keep your mouth shut unless you were guzzling pints. The old skinflint refused to put in a television. We were lucky to have the radio, which he turned on for the news headlines and The Angelus. Otherwise, it was turned off and covered with a towel.
“Television is only for fools,” Curly said. “You may as well stare at the shadows on the wall.”
He only ever showed an interest in neighbours’ misfortunes or deaths. He’s dead himself now, fifteen years this May. All his penny pinching didn’t save him in the end.
The German stood out in Curley’s. A quare-hawk, according to Frank Sheehy, and he was one to know. The German wore a leather hat with a wide brim. He was bald as an egg underneath with long straggly hair at the back. Baldy hair, Curley’s nephew, Emmet, called it. Young Curley was no oil painting; the locals called him “The Can-Opener” because of his wide jaw and big mouth.
The German spoke with a strong accent but made himself understood. Weighed up everything and took his time like he was searching for the right word. He’d look into the distance and smile when he heard the shite spouted in Curley’s. Every so often, he'd pull a copybook out of his bag and start writing. A school exercise book, lined with squares. I never got around to asking him what he wrote in it.
One night, he recited the countries in Africa he’d visited: Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and other places I can’t recall. Micky Mongan listened in on our conversation. A narrow-minded hoor with the face of a starved hound. He looked over at us, his dirty old eyebrows pointing at the German.
"Yarragh," he spat out, "what would you want over there in Africa with those balubas."
I didn’t ask what brought him into our corner of East Galway as I tend not to be inquisitive, and don’t like to pry. The same couldn’t be said of the German. He had no end of questions. “What is your thinking…?” he would start, or “How do you know…?” The others didn’t like his questions but I enjoyed the change, much better than hearing the same back and forth between the likes of Fahy and Sheehy about funerals or ringworm.
I spent fifteen years over in Leeds working for Tetley, the brewers. I didn’t take to the Yorkshire people. They were friendly enough but I had nothing in common with them. I married a girl I met in the Irish Club. Her name was Anne and, like me, she had gone to England for work. We lived in a small house in Kirkstall, near the old abbey. Anne was a sweet girl and her laughter lifted my black moods. We were together only three years. She died of cancer and a mood settled on me that I wore like a second skin.
So I came back to this spot, thirty acres of rough grazing and enough cattle to keep me going. I suppose it's true that the savage loves his native shore. I told the German my story. We were sitting in the kitchen. He liked to drink his tea without milk or sugar and always with one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. I still have one of them in a plastic bag in a drawer. It was the only thing he left behind.
"You must have been homesick," he said.
I doubted that as I never had any great yearning for this place. When I lived in Leeds I felt uneasy and never settled. It was something in my make-up. I asked the German if, after all his travels, was he not homesick.
"No," he answered, "I travel to get away from myself."
He never said what part of Germany he came from, and I never asked.
"You don’t appreciate what you have here."
I had to laugh at that. “What’s there to appreciate in this back of beyond?”
"You have everything that is important, the essentials."
He was living in a tent up on Gentian Hill. A makeshift thing, barely big enough to accommodate his lanky frame. Tom Finan charged him to pitch it in one of his fields. I offered him some space beside a stream at no charge. The German drove all his stuff down in a crock of a van that had seen better days. He didn’t thank me, but I wasn't looking for thanks.
The German took a particular interest in Naughton the Guard. Big Pat Naughton, hooked nose and grey brush of hair, perched on the same barstool and sucking on a pint, closing time long passed.
“I’m as content,” he’d say, huge smile on his face.
The German asked Naughton a hundred questions, but what he really wanted to know was why Naughton was so content. A strange thing to ask. Naughton loved his pint and liked his job. No crime to speak of, sitting all day long with his feet up on the desk, nothing to do but check faulty tractor lights, stamp applications and dig the spuds in the garden at the back of the police station.
“Are you never disappointed? Is there nothing more you want?” the German asked. "What about all the injustice and tragedy in the world?"
"There's no end of injustice." Naughton nodded his big head. "There'd be tragedy anyway, no matter what I wanted."
Frank Sheehy called him a heathen. The German asked Sheehy what he thought would have happened if Eve had handed the apple back to the snake. Sheehy was sure the German was mocking him and he didn’t like it one bit. The German told me he had no need for religion. Even so, he often called into St. Anthony’s when mass ended. He said he liked the stillness, the austerity of the stone walls and the grandeur of the stained glass. As for the people he saw praying, the old women in their black garb and the men kneeling with their caps in their hands, he respected their belief but it wasn’t for him.
"The Church calls everything that gives you pleasure a sin," he said. "It doesn't allow any independent thinking."
I told him that wasn’t a problem in these parts.
December that year was harsh: bitter winds and horizontal rain, sleet and hail. Not conditions for living in a tent. I invited the German to stay with me in the house, and he agreed. I made up a cot in the front room for him. He asked if I needed help with anything. I told him there wasn't much doing on the land at that time of year. He found a pile of dead branches good for firewood, chopped them up with an axe and stacked them by the fire.
I had second thoughts about asking him to stay. Living so long by myself, I didn’t know how to handle a visitor. As it turned out, those were the best times. The gales blew outside while we sat at the fire, the German rolling his cigarettes or writing in his exercise book, but seldom speaking. A comfortable quietness, though some nights he seemed more withdrawn. When I asked if anything was bothering him, he said he was thinking of things that had happened on his travels. Mostly good things, but the traces they left made him sad.
We would read our own stories in the flames of the fire. One night, he tapped me on the knee.
"Do you miss Anne?"
I was glad he remembered her name. I pictured her lying on the grass when we had picnics at the back of Kirkstall Abbey. And I thought of the doctor, his widow’s peak and solemn words: The cancer is widespread. After he told me that, I went out into the street and stood among passers-by who had all their time in front of them. They walked by me in a hurry to get somewhere, and I couldn’t see any point in all their rushing. I saw a girl in a coat like the one Anne wore, and I remember thinking that one day she’d be old.
Another night, I poured him a glass of whiskey and he drowned it in water. Then, he held up the jug of water.
"This jug is more to you than a jug. It is a part of you. When you see it, you think of different people and occasions and good or bad feelings. It holds all your experiences. But it is still a jug. With or without you, it will be a jug."
He stared into the fire, and I could tell he was far away, lost in his own thoughts. The German was a hard man to fathom. If I understood a quarter of the things he came out with, I'd be doing well.
He finished his whiskey and shook his head. "That is what you call shite talk." It was gas the way he said it.
In the build-up to Christmas, I put up some holly and tinsel and arranged all the old Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. I always went to the bank every two weeks, and took out enough money to see me through the fortnight. I kept the cash with the bank-book in the kitchen cabinet. The week before Christmas, I withdrew twice as much as usual.
The next day, when I came in from mending a fence in the back-field, the van wasn’t parked in its usual spot. The German’s bag and his few belongings were gone. I thought he might have taken a trip and would be back by Christmas. When I went to get money from the cabinet, I knew he’d gone for good.
The German had his reasons for what he did. He could have taken all the money but he didn’t, just enough for him to move on. I managed to get through Christmas with what was left. Maybe he got bored of me. I wasn’t great company for him. He didn’t leave a note; no goodbye, just the single cigarette on the hearth where he used to sit.
I sit here and think. Not about the present, which is no great shakes. As for the future, well that isn't what it used to be as the man said. I think about the German, and about earlier times. Looking into the fire, I see a face or recall a name, and it takes me back to my childhood. Whatever money the German took, it was small payment for what he gave me. I don’t feel lonely. You’re alone no matter how many people there are around you.
The night before the German left, he got very down on himself.
"Thinking is no replacement for life," he said.
He took the poker and prodded the fire, something he never did. Maybe I should have realised he planned on leaving. The signs were there—the German was never going to stay for long.
"The people here are practical. They know how to deal with life." He sounded weary.
“They’re ignorant and conniving,” I said.
"Too much thinking is a curse."
Those were the German’s final words. He was a troubled man that night, and I had nothing to say to help him.
The German is long gone and I’m still here, but I’m not the man I was before he came. Looking at the jug and the cup he used to drink from, I think they’re different too, that they have kept something of him. I’ve this terrible feeling of loss, and the heart shifts inside me when I think of all the things outside my reach. I’m not made for this life, not like Mongan and Sheehy and the others. The German did what he had to do to keep going.
It’s all changed up in Curley’s now. Window boxes full of flowers, a satellite dish on the roof and wall-to-wall TVs, poker machines and karaoke nights. Old Curley must be turning in his grave. Last week, I saw a sign for Oktoberfest in the window: five different beers on tap. I wondered what the German would have made of that. It was good to have met him. If I have a wish at all it’s that he knows the good he did when he was here.
