The Turtle Woman: A Fantastic Romance

By Esther Murbach

Emily is a Swiss woman with a unique disfigurement: a shell covers her body. Successful as a writer but privately resigned to a life without love, she undertakes a trip to Ireland to explore her partly Irish roots. This proves to be a turning point in her life. She discovers a spiritual bond with the Emerald Isle and meets a man who is her counterpart. Niall, an Irish patriot, guesses what her condition is and where it comes from, because he had once experienced it himself. He offers her his understanding and help. They open up to each other, disclosing their dark secrets. In a difficult and painful process Emily overcomes her physical and emotional boundaries with Nialls assistance. Together they start on an emotional and spiritual journey as soul mates. Niall takes Emily to the Aran Island of Inishmore, where she meets her Irish grandmother for the first time. A few obstacles have to be overcome before Emily and Niall finally understand where their happiness lies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jan 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467881852

Esther Murbach

After a long career as a journalist and translator, Esther Murbach decided to do what she had always wanted, to become a novelist. Since 2009 she has published three books in German. The Turtle Woman is her first book written in English. The mother of two adult daughters lives in Basel, Switzerland.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

The Country Child

The Paradise Lost

Old Pains

Niall’s Tale

The Magic Cave

Emily’s Secrets

The Storm

A New Dawn

Finding Home

Acknowledgements

First of all, my thanks for inspiration and help go to the Irish tour director who prefers to remain anonymous. His verdict of It’s good! after reading the first twenty-three pages of the manuscript gave me the motivation to go on.

I am indebted to my neighbour and friend Mariana Streiff, who was with me through every stage of the writing process and gave me valuable constructive criticism.

Thank you, Mariana!

Preface

I began writing my fourth book in spring 2011, starting with some of my childhood memories. I wrote it in my native German tongue. It was supposed to become a mix of memoirs and fiction, but somehow the spark was missing. Summer came, and my friend Edith suggested we take a holiday together, preferably a tour around Ireland. So we did. We set out on a big coach from Dublin going south, then clockwise up to the northwest and down again on the east. After Dublin our first stop was Glendalough, and there it happened. I started falling in love with Ireland. The love grew with every day and every stage of the tour, until I was totally hooked on the Emerald Isle. Some of my enthusiasm, and not only mine, was due to the competence and inner fire of our guide, a real Irish patriot. It was my first encounter with one of the most incredible species in the world, a race of full-blooded multi-taskers bred by the Irish Tourist Board—the Irish tour director.

An Irish tour director is a true phenomenon. He consists of at least a dozen specialists rolled into one, namely driver, porter, guide, historian, lecturer, route planner, psychologist, nurse, social worker, trouble-shooter, disc jockey, entertainer, and sometimes live singer. He must have kissed the Blarney Stone, which bestows the gift of eloquence on the kisser, at least ten times. Keeping up a positive mood and memorizing a load of the worst mother-in-law-jokes is compulsory. And most important of all, he must know all the shamrock gift shops with attached toilets in the whole country and must lead his flock to them at well-calculated intervals. Afterwards, said flock has to be shooed back into the coach on time and without the help of a border collie. A head count three times over is recommended. The only thing not expected from the tour director is carrying pampers on the coach. An occasional pampering of difficult customers may at times be required though.

To make a long story short, the trip did its trick. The spark was ignited. Back in Switzerland I adapted what I had written so far into English and changed the concept of the narrative. A big part of the plot was moved to Ireland, which forced me (forced?) to go back again two months later for research. After all, I needed a further look at the country of my inspiration. I set up base in Galway for two weeks, where on the day after my arrival whom should I bump into by pure coincidence? None other than the tour director from the summer tour. We sat together, and I gently broke the news to him that I planned to use him partly as a role model for the hero of this tale. He graciously bent to the inevitable and agreed to supervise my text, correcting any errors about Ireland I might commit.

The tale speaks in a symbolic way of what Ireland and its incredible spiritual energy can do to some people. It awakens you, changes you, and turns your world upside down. If it does that, you’ll never recover from the experience. The Irish smile in your heart will stay forever until the end of your days.

Esther Murbach, 2011

The Country Child

When I was small, I lived in the country with my grandparents. I never asked myself why I lived with my grandparents. All the other children in the village lived with their parents, but I didn’t miss having parents. I belonged to GrannyPa, and they belonged to me. I called them GrannyPa because to me they were a unity, a symbiosis, though at the time I didn’t know the word symbiosis and what it meant. Of course I knew GrannyPa were really two people, but it took me some years to realize they did not always feel and think as one. As long as I saw them as one, belonging to me and loving me as one, my world was perfect.

My world, our world, was the little village of Idylliken in the green hills of the upper Baselbiet, a rural area about thirty kilometres from the city of Basel. The river Ergolz flowed placidly through the meadows in a shallow curve not far from the old farmhouse where we lived. There was a small sandbank in the curve, with many pebbles and other interesting objects washed up by the clear rippling waters. Often I would say to GrannyPa that I was going to collect precious stones on the sandbank, and every time I would get the same reply, uttered with a mix of concern and tolerant understanding of a child’s need to do things on her own: Don’t fall into the water! Never would they have tried to keep me from my forays, whether to the riverbank or to the forest or to the neighbour’s stable. When I brought back coloured stones or polished glass shards from the riverbank, which to me were jewels, they would admire them with me and let me put them in a little wooden box, padded inside with one of Granny’s embroidered hankies, and hide them in the cupboard so that no thief would find them.

When I grew older and started reading—long before I was due to go to school—I learnt things that took away some of my childish beliefs and illusions. It began with me identifying the letters in the book of fairy tales GrannyPa used to read to me over and over again. I watched their fingers follow the lines, asking more and more questions instead of just listening. What is this sign? What does that one mean? Patiently they explained the letters to me, the sounds they stood for, how they were assembled to form words and meanings. One day I took the book out of GrannyPa’s hands. I can tell the story myself now, I said. You listen. So the bedtime story routine was turned around. I read to GrannyPa—to either of them or both of them—haltingly at first but soon fluently, savouring every word that took on a meaning in front of my eyes.

She is so precocious, Grandpa used to say proudly to the man in the shop across the road where he took me to buy cologne. He needed the cologne for his barbershop, where all the farmers from the village came to get a shave or a haircut. Invariably he slapped the pungently smelling liquid on their cheeks after every shave, no matter how much it burnt a freshly scraped skin. His customers took it stoically. No one complained. He was the expert, and he knew what was best. If Carl made your skin burn, it must be for a good reason.

Carl. That was his name. To me, he was just Grandpa whom I loved unconditionally and who loved me. He never slapped me with cologne, never burnt my skin. Carl the barber was a different person, albeit an interesting one. I liked to watch and listen while he served his clients. He whipped up froth from a white powder mixed with water in a china bowl, smeared it on their ruddy cheeks with a round brush, and then scraped it off with a shiny perfectly honed knife. He honed the knives himself. The handle of the brush came from the horn of an unlucky cow; the bristles were the unwilling donation of a badger. He would slide the froth mixed with the cut-off stubbles from the knife back into the bowl. I thought the formerly pristine white matter looked especially ugly when the stubbles in it were black. A swipe or two with a wet towel removed the rest of the foam from the client’s face, and then came the cologne.

In the shop across the road I had to stand on my toes to raise my nose over the high wooden counter, where the shopkeeper put the cologne after taking it from a shelf. Self-service had not yet reached the little village store. I didn’t know what precocious meant, but I heard the pride in Grandpa’s voice, so it must be something good.

Many years later I saw it in a different light. Being precocious also meant that the pain was worse when you understood about grown-up things but were still a child without grown-up defences. Reading put an end to my innocence. My compulsive devouring of printed matter included anything I could lay my eyes on—Granny’s cooking recipes, dusty books I found in the attic, magazines in Grandpa’s barber shop, tattered by the rough fingers of impatient customers while waiting for their turn under the knife or scissors. It was in one of these magazines that I first saw a picture of Siamese twins and the caption to go with it. It said that they lived in a symbiosis and that they were tied to each other for life, for better and for worse, without any alternative, whether they got on with each other or not—and often they did not. They were two minds in one duplex body, longing to be disengaged. Secretly I cried, but I couldn’t talk about it to GrannyPa, for they didn’t like me to read all those magazines, even though they were not able to keep me away from them all the time. So I was on my own, trying to process the twins’ tragedy in my precocious mind. Also, there was this word in the caption which I didn’t fully understand and which frightened me. Freaks, it said. The twins considered themselves as freaks. It sounded terrible. I hated the word at first sight. Many years later I remembered it as a premonition of what was happening to me, the freak I was turning into myself.

However, my first six years were painless and magic. Magic filled the old farmhouse we lived in, barely heatable in winter but full of interesting nooks and crannies. Sometimes I saw shiny little spectres sitting in the dark corners, for instance on the circular staircase which wound up to the first floor. They were friendly spectres, smiling and waving to me with tiny transparent hands. One of them would always put a finger to his mouth, as if I didn’t know that this was a secret between them and me, that I could see them and nobody else could. They acted as my glow worms when I had to go upstairs and the light from the dim naked bulb hanging from the ceiling had failed again, or if I peeped into other dark places of the old building, like the empty stables where GrannyPa once had kept a cow and two goats. The animals were long gone, but sometimes I could see their shapes against the black wooden walls, hardly visible and glassy like soap bubbles. Slowly the bubbly cow would turn her head to look at me with friendly complacent eyes. So did the goats, moving somewhat faster than the cow. It never occurred to me to stroke them; I knew my touch would make them burst. Of course they were a secret too, for my eyes only.

Never was I afraid in that old house. And for all its lack of comfort, I never felt uncomfortable, but always comforted within its walls—as long as I was little. I didn’t know then how lucky I was.

Attached to the house was a large shed with one door on the east side and one on the south side, both leading onto the grassland. The doors were made of rough planks with large slits between them. They were vertical boards stabilized by two horizontal ones, one on top, one on the bottom, and a diagonal one connecting the two. All the boards were fixed together merely with iron nails gone rusty with time and weather. From time to time Grandpa got his tools and hammered a new nail into the wood next to an old rotting one. Usually the doors were open all day long, closed at night, but hardly ever locked. In the big rusty locks the equally rusty keys could barely be turned. They were left in the locks anyway, even if GrannyPa did lock up on some nights. Any amateur thief would have laughed his head off at this, but there were apparently no thieves in our village. Or if there were, those doors signalled to them clearly that there was nothing worth stealing.

Next to the south door was the outhouse, located inside the shed, a wooden cabin with a heart-shaped hole on the upper side of the door. The door could be locked only from the inside with an iron hook. Needless to say, it was rusty like the nails but still functional. The outhouse didn’t smell good. But what could you expect from a wooden bench with an open round hole in the middle, where the contents of your insides drop directly into a pit? Once a year a man came with a big cart holding a big barrel and pumped everything up. He collected all the manure in the village and then spread it on the fields, even on GrannyPa’s grassland and orchards. So we gave back to the land what we had taken from it, from the grass and the fruit trees and the vegetable patches and the corn fields. For a few days the stench was everywhere, and I was not allowed to walk on the grass until the next rain washed the waste into the ground. Nobody was concerned about hygiene and disease and contamination. Things had been handled like this for centuries in a world where chemical fertilizers and water closets had not yet taken over. But now chemicals and