Writer Nuala O'Faolain's final wish before she died was to visit Berlin, a city where she had always planned to live. It was a journey she made with friends, and so was tinged with humour, sadness and great hope, writes Hugo Hamilton.
HOW TO remain visible in the face of death? Bringing Nuala O'Faolain on her final wish to see Berlin before she died was a sad and memorable journey, but also one of fun and optimism. For the writer whose memoir in German translation was entitled Just don't become invisible, this was a remarkable way of staying alive.
Nuala and I had often talked about her going to Berlin. She considered spending a year there to write, as I had done. In April, just after she had returned from New York, diagnosed with cancer, already on crutches, we both took part in a panel discussion on memoir writing at the Ennis Book Festival and afterwards the idea of a Berlin visit became so much more urgent. "I would just love to see the Pergamon museum," she said. "And I love the way Germans do potatoes."
Three weeks later we sat in the old terminal at Dublin airport — Nuala, her friends Brian Sheehan and Luke Dodd, Mary Rose and myself — waiting for a private jet which had been lent to us by an Irish businessman.
By that time, her imminent death had already become a public event. "My grief is my own, their hope is their own," she had said, crying openly on the radio as she described leaving her writer's room in New York and parting with "those lovely yellow silk curtains that I got made for a thousand dollars."
Like a Beckett figure, she had become detached from her belongings. The material world was suddenly meaningless. Even the inner one of books and information, the stories, all that she had witnessed in her lifetime was about to disappear with her, she said. And yet, that despair seemed to be matched along the way by the excitement of a schoolgirl.
"This has become something else now," she said, "this journey." While her friend Luke sewed a button onto her coat, she spoke about upcoming weddings, events for which she would no longer be alive, about the political landscape ahead.
From time to time she had tears in her eyes. She had begun to sort things out, she told us, saying goodbye to people she knew, giving things away, planting trees, giving away €800,000 to an Aids project in Africa set up by her friend and broadcaster Marian Finucane.
"I'll have to buy some proper sheets in Berlin," she remarked. "Pillows that I can put my head down on when I go out."
Arriving in Tempelhof Airport, she sat in the car for a moment under the famous Sagebiel overhang, feeling more like a spy as the customs official came out to check her passport. She had decided to splash out and stay at the Adlon Hotel, next to the Brandenburg Gate. But then, as she strayed into a service lift, that horror of being alone returned suddenly. Unable to find her way back to the foyer, she was heard calling out before she could be rescued.
All the more reason to pack everything into this short, final tour of Berlin. Sitting in her wheelchair in front of the Pergamon altar, looking at ornate fragments of this ancient civilisation, she wondered with her mischievous intellect if "this is where the Irish wedding cake culture came from".
She wanted to see the remains of the Berlin Wall, around the Bernauer Strasse, where the tunnels were built. The Jewish memorial and the site of the book-burning outside the Humboldt University. Booked tickets for a production of Don Carlos at the Staatsoper and had dinner in the Paris Bar, where Marlene Dietrich also had her farewell party in the city.
"We're getting so much done," she kept saying. Above all she wanted to spend an afternoon in the botanic gardens in Steglitz, where the spring suddenly came to meet her, where she could sit gazing at all this living stuff hurling itself into the future beyond her.
There has always been an unspoken consensus that Ireland was rescued from itself by strong women. In a country dominated so long by the patriarchal Catholic Church, where emigration was often the only form of dissent left, Nuala played an important role in fighting for social justice and personal freedom which marked the transition of Irish society.
At the forefront of this Irish revolution, her outspoken way of hitting home the most blatant truths about ourselves became essential in a country which had always been so fond of talking, but where the truth had become suppressed. She had the tin-opener gift of questioning everything. Perhaps it was speaking in such a personal way that turned her into an archetypal witness to Ireland's transformation.
HER OWN STORY was one of formative loneliness in a large Irish family of nine children, marked by the effects of alcoholism. Nuala wrote and spoke about that deficit of love inside the family home which can never be repaired. At the Ennis Book Festival, we disagreed on the subject of how to look back. With her characteristic combative nature, she said that my idea of stepping into the shoes of our parents' generation, giving them the right of reply in order to understand them, was just "romantic".
I had struggled with this issue in my own memoir, the experience of being conscripted as a child into the flawed experiments of your own parents. But how much can you accuse them, remains one of my questions. How could I ever forgive my father for the despotic mark he inflicted on his family in his uncompromising crusade for the Irish language? And how could I ever forgive myself or my German mother for belonging to a country that had created Auschwitz? Perhaps my mother is still whispering to me, "If you hate your own father, you will hate yourself as well". There was some need to get beyond that grievance, not to remain a victim but to allow the writing of my own painful family history to reach further than a complaint.
For Nuala, coming to terms with her life experience was turned into something more vociferous. She felt the need to change things, to fight not only for herself but for everyone else, to expose the damage done in our society.
Like the writer John McGahern, there were good reasons for not compromising. He found it impossible to understand the mercurial cruelty of his father, just as Nuala spoke with unconcealed anger at the bitterness which her own mother had brought into the family home. Maybe they remind me of Joyce and his refusal to kneel at his mother's deathbed because it seemed so much like acquiescence, collaboration with an order that was still so much in power.
Is there a grudge in every writer? Some inspired ability to hold on to such vital faculties of anger and resentment, the unwillingness to let things go. Unlike most people who simply live with it, writers go back and pick up all the hurt, examining and remembering crucial details, turning them over like a coin in your pocket for the rest of your life in order to explain and set things right.
There are those who will say that forgiveness is not a true virtue, nothing to do with altruism but some calculated ability to invest in a handshake for our own benefit and peace of mind. Perhaps it is nothing more than our wish to become guilt-free consumers that has changed us so much in this country and stopped us from sending blame and accountability back along the arch of descent. No longer do we blame our enemies, no longer do we accuse the British for our flaws, because we have become responsible for our own social inequalities now.
I wanted to discuss all this with her in Berlin, but there was no right time to do so. It felt more like prosecuting at the last judgment.
Staring out quietly as we passed by an Albert Speer building, it seemed more appropriate to tell her about the concept of "ruin-value" which Speer and Hitler had developed. A death wish had made them erect models of buildings in stone and concrete in the Lueneberg countryside and then had them bombed to compare which looked more impressive in the aftermath of a war.
In Berlin, Nuala was surrounded by friends: waiters and drivers who felt the benefit of her great generosity. On a trip to the house in Wannsee where the final solution was announced, she sat for a moment with her hand over her mouth, unable to say much. "So this is the place, by the lake."
The Don Carlos opera was the night out in Berlin. We wheeled her down Unter den Linden. She was wearing a black dress, bright red Converse runners and lacquered rain mac. Holding her hand, there was a feeling that the pulse of life had begun to go in the opposite direction, that with every step she moved closer to death, we were being brought more and more vividly to life. And so too was this city, with all its memory and its history. It had taken on new meaning through her eyes.
Nuala had seen Don Carlos only recently at the Met in New York. Here in Berlin the production was more daring, with live and naked bodies of Inquisition victims hung upside down on ropes at a crucial dinner scene.
"Oh my God, those poor people," she said afterwards, wondering if there was some kind of hidden message, some reference to "Abu Ghraib" maybe.
THE LAST MORNING was taken up pulling out every sheet in the Kaufhaus des Westens department store. She felt the fabric each time, proof of the tactile world still in her hands. Something soft. Colour was something you began your life with, she pointed out. "White is the colour you should end with."
But there was one more thing she had to see. The Stalingrad Madonna at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in ruins since the second World War. "The melting church," she called it, and, inside, she sat looking at the charcoal drawing rescued from the winter cauldron of Stalingrad, translating the words "Light, Life, Love" for herself in a whisper.
After which a few candles were lit, another reminder of how life started for her in churches back home in Ireland. A candle for her friend Brian's mother who was very ill. A candle for the people in Palestine.
Would she light a candle for her own father and mother, Mary Rose asked? "Ah no," she said, pausing for a moment. "Let's light one for those poor Abu Ghraib people hanging upside down in Don Carlos instead."