Every Single Minute by Hugo Hamilton Page B

and run around in circles to welcome her back, celebrating the way that only dogs do. He’s perfectly happy, I tell her. For all he knows, you might as well be gone down the road to get a bottle of wine as off in Berlin. Besides, he was well used to her being away. Every time she went to New York, he stayed with Mary, her neighbour, so he was always at home. And whenever she came back, she would bring him straight down to Clare so they could walk across the Burren together, Buddy running ahead and coming back every now and again to make sure she was still there.
    Is he OK, Liam, do you think?
    He’s very well looked after, Úna.
    Do you think he knows?
    I can’t answer that. She is aware that dogs can tell what’s going on, they can smell illness, but I don’t want to remind her. She can be sure that Mary treats him like part of the family and he’ll be even more delighted to see her when she gets back.
    We’re at the Berlin Wall now, what’s left of it, passing along the outside with all the graffiti. Outside or inside, it’s hard to know at this stage. We’re looking at the height of it and saying it’s not as tall as we thought, in comparison to other walls nowadays. She loves all the colour, the drawings. She gets Manfred to tell her the stories, the wall going up and families escaping, mothers handing babies across barbed wire, tunnels, spies, plus all the ironic things that happened later on when the wall came down again, like the man bringing back a library book he borrowed thirty years ago.
    What were they thinking?
    She asks Manfred that question like a girl. Because she likes to go back in time to the very beginning to try and work it out logically, step by step. She lets on that she’s like a blank envelope and she knows nothing about the Cold War or anything to do with the twentieth century. She wants Manfred to go over the whole story again, as if that part of history was happening in front of us.
    How can they put up a wall, she says, in the middle of a city? Manfred. Could you explain that to me?
    So Manfred gives her a summary of the time before he was born, which is more complicated than you might think. He blows air out through his lips and gives her a list of facts while the traffic is talking over him, arguing with him. And she’s ticking off things inside her head, waiting for him to come up with something new. She likes the story of the woman escaping by clinging on underneath a car, but she wants Manfred to tell her something about himself, what side of the wall he grew up on. So he tells her that he was only a child in the west and he would never have met his Polish wife, Olga, if the wall was still there.
    The past is so childish, she says.
    She asks Manfred would he mind getting her a bottle of water, she’s thirsty. He goes away but she calls him back to give him the money. It takes a moment for her to search around in her bag, even though she can clearly see her purse from the outside. When Manfred is gone she sits forward in the wheelchair with her arms folded, trying to imagine his life.
    Imagine Manfred on one side of the wall, she says, and Olga on the other, unable to get to each other. Imagine the wall coming down and Olga rushing across into Manfred’s arms and they have three children in quick succession. Imagine being born at the right time, she says. Imagine being born too early or too late. Imagine not knowing that things can change. Imagine all the news not reported yet. Things we don’t know yet. All the people coming after me, she says.
    Imagine not knowing what happened in the past, she says. Imagine things happening and you thought they were just happening.
    Imagine not knowing about 9/11.
    Maybe she’s lost the thread of what she was about to say. She begins worrying about Buddy again, because she once lost him on one of her walks and thought he would never come back again. It was the worst moment of her life, she says.
    Don’t worry about Buddy, I tell her. He’s