Romulus, My Father Read online

  Paradoxically, perhaps, this encounter with a transcendent natural beauty drove me deeper into the world of books. My father encouraged me to read. As did Ronald Mottek, the primary-school teacher at Baringhup SS 1687,who lent me books from his library. An eccentric Dutchman, he was a wonderful teacher. He had a habit of punctuating his speech with ‘Shh’. When we looked impatiently at the electric clock on the wall, he waved an alarm clock in front of us, and in his loud, clear, tenor voice, shouted, ‘Tick. Shh. Tick. Listen. Tick Tick. Each tick and you are a second closer to your grave. Shh.’

  The school had only twenty or so pupils at the time and Mottek taught all six grades. (Later, numbers declined to thirteen.) He came to the classroom early each morning to fill the blackboards with work, so that while he was teaching one group the others could get on with the tasks set on the blackboard. I tried to be at school by eight so that I could talk to him while he wrote. Mottek encouraged me to read and to question. ‘Now, what would Raimond say?’ Mottek would ask the class. They did not know. Nor did Raimond. ‘Raimond would ask, “Why?”’ he said, mischief in his eyes. He encouraged my father to ensure that I had a good secondary education, but my father was not in need of encouragement. Many of the local farmers were suspicious of Mottek and he was often in trouble with the school council for his unconventional beliefs and behaviour.

  Mottek had a deep respect for my father which my father returned. They were, however, strong personalities in ways that tended to clash, and so they did not strike up a close friendship. Mottek also understood my father well and understood particularly his desire— his need—for me to grow up decently. When the film Blackboard Jungle came to Maryborough, I happened to see it. Bill Haley sang ‘Rock around the Clock’ over the opening titles. Quite spontaneously, the youths of Maryborough, nearly all of whom were in the theatre, stamped their feet in time with the beat. I was impressed and excited. When I told Mottek how much I had liked the film, I noticed the interest he took in that fact. He knew that I was attracted to the film’s delinquent characters. A few days later, when we were talking before school, he told me, ‘Be careful what you do. If you were to do anything bad, if you were to be in trouble with the police, the disappointment would kill your father.’

  Most weekends, my father and I went by motorbike to visit friends or to the cinema. We often went to Maldon to see Mr and Mrs Smolak, who had three children, two around my age. For a time we went to the pictures on Saturday night and to church on Sunday in Maldon, after which my father took our washing to Mrs Smolak. He seldom spoke to them of his woes, but once I overheard him say to her, ‘My son is everything to me.’

  The picture theatre in Maldon was a simple hall with wooden chairs.The projectionist climbed a ladder through the verandah to operate the equipment.When we didn’t go to Maldon we went to Maryborough or Castlemaine. I particularly liked going to Maryborough because after the film we always drank a coffee in the milk bar opposite the theatre and, later, because I could play the jukebox. Though Castlemaine with its wide streets and many fine buildings is a more attractive city, at the time Maryborough seemed more lively. Then, as now, Maldon with its hills and old buildings which were preserved because the town could not afford to tear them down and build new ones, was lovely but sleepy, somewhere to take rabbit skins, or to go to the bank, but not to seek the excitement of town life.

  We travelled everywhere by motorbike. I was particularly proud of the Sunbeam. It was a fine machine with tyres as thick as those on a small car and driven by a shaft rather than a chain. Although my father rode at speed and often dangerously overloaded it, he was always conscious of how inherently dangerous motorbike travel is.

  ‘They only have two wheels,’ he reminded people.

  Anxious for my safety, he decided I was more likely to slip off the back pillion than he was to crash and fall onto me, so until I was eight I sat on the petrol tank of whichever motorbike we happened to be using.

  He wore a long leather coat, leather gloves, leather helmet and goggles. I wore an army greatcoat which trailed half a metre on the ground, with newspapers protecting my chest against the cold, a leather helmet, mittens and goggles. My father parked his motorbike outside the cinema wherever we were, and I was embarrassed as he dressed me in this outfit in full view of the crowd which gathered on the footpath to talk about the film for some time after it had finished.

  My father bought the Sunbeam from Vacek (pronounced Va-tzek) Vilkovikas.Vacek was a Lithuanian whom my father had met in the camp at Cairn Curran. Not long after the camp was dispersed,Vacek began to lose his mind. He lived in the hills outside Maldon, between two granite boulders sealed with corrugated iron, branches and bits of timber. His living space was not much wider than his narrow wooden bunk, which he bolted to one of the boulders so that he could fold it up when he was not using it. Not far from this rude shelter he built a small shed in which he kept awful concoctions that he had cooked, sometimes in his urine. Every so often the police from Maldon would take him to a mental hospital, but he was soon released as he was of no harm to himself or to anyone else. Occasionally he travelled to other cities—Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide—but would always return, sometimes with hair-raising stories of police brutality towards him.

  Vacek often came to visit us and would sleep in the spare bedroom. Invariably he came unannounced, late at night, and rapped at the window. ‘Mr Gaita, Master Raimond,’ he would call. Had we not known him we would have been frightened because his heavily bearded face looked fearsome at the window, especially in winter, with his collar up and the beanie which he always wore pulled low over his forehead. Sometimes he stayed a night or two, sometimes longer, always leaving as suddenly and with as little ceremony as he came.

  He was a gentle man, well educated for the times and of a poetic, dreamy nature. He smoked a pipe, which I thought suited him. One day he bought sausages in Maryborough and left them on the table to attend to something elsewhere. By the time he returned Orloff had eaten them.Vacek had very little money and the sausages were a treat. He called Orloff. ‘You must tell me the truth, did you eat my sausages?’ Orloff ’s expression could leave no one in doubt. Vacek then told Orloff how deeply disappointed he was, that the sausages were a treat, that he never dreamed that Orloff would so miserably betray his trust. He entreated him never to do anything like it again. Later he swore to Hora that, overcome with shame, Orloff had promised he would not.

  Vacek’s sense of communion with animals extended to the smallest creatures. One day Tom Lillie asked him to wash his car. While he was doing it, a grub fell onto the car from a tree, its body arched. Vacek stopped to reflect on what this could mean. His eyes followed the curve of the arch to its open ends and he noticed an unwashed part of the car. He concluded that the grub had fallen just there in order to show him this, thereby saving him from humiliating criticism.

  His feelings for human beings were no less openhearted. He and Hora were walking by the river at Baringhup, beside a paddock filled with Scotch thistles that were tall and green with thick stalks. Vacek remarked that they would make good jam and then ruminated on the possibility of building a factory to make jams from the thistles which grew everywhere in the area. His interest was not in making money. It was philanthropic. He wanted to build a factory devoted to providing humane conditions for its workers.

  The summer days were lazy. We wore only shorts and mostly went barefoot. Hora loved the sun and when he stayed with us we luxuriated in it for hours, he smoking and me listening to his stories. He rolled his cigarettes so tightly that they often went out. Relighting them became a ritual whose pleasure for him consisted mostly in his doing it slowly. When I sat on his knee, my impatient wriggling often caused him to burn me accidentally with the ash that fell from his cigarettes. It happened so often that he chuckled at my protests whenever he did it.

  When it was too hot to sit in the sun, we swam, sometimes at Cairn Curran and often in the dam less than twenty metres from the back of the house. In
the hot summers of the early 1950s we were grateful for the dam. It was not large, only thirty or so metres in diameter, but in the middle the water came over our heads. It had fish and many yabbies that nibbled at our toes as soon as we stood in one spot for more than a minute. I do not recall ever being bitten, but the sensation of them nibbling was unpleasant, so I was very glad when Hora built a jetty-cum-diving-board because I never needed to touch the bottom again. Once or twice, in exceptionally heavy rains, the dam flooded so extravagantly that I found fish and yabbies a kilometre and more into the paddocks.

  The construction of the diving-board enabled Hora to devise a method to teach me to swim. He tied one end of a rope to my waist and the other end to a large pole and then told me to jump off the end of the board. I did and sank, whereupon he pulled me to the surface like a fish on the end of a line. This continued for some days, long enough for me to find it remarkable that one could sink so often before the relatively instinctive movements of a dog-paddle were effectively elicited. Perhaps the fact that I trusted Hora so completely made these unorthodox swimming lessons drag on longer than if he had just pushed me in without a rope to save me. At any rate, the method proved effective and one day I joyfully dog-paddled around the dam instead of sinking. It was important for me to learn to swim, for the usual reasons, and also because Hora was a keen swimmer. He loved the water. When in it, he gave whoops of pleasure, splashed furiously, dived under, swam powerfully, frontwards, backwards and on his side, as though born to it. I needed to swim in order to share this part of his life.

  In later years Hora and my father built an aluminium boat which Hora and I often sailed on Cairn Curran. My father and Vacek accompanied us to the water’s edge where they swam a little, but they were not at home in the water and were not keen to go in the boat even though it was unsinkable, with outriggers and 20-litre drums at either end.

  Vacek sailed in it only once, the day that Hora and I decided to swim the two kilometres across Cairn Curran. Vacek was alarmed, imploring us not to do anything so reckless. When his pleas failed to move us, he insisted on accompanying my father who was to sail alongside us. We were less than halfway across when severe cramp seized my legs and torso and I had to be hauled into the boat.Vacek fussed over me, begging me never to do such a thing again. That night he often muttered to himself how foolish and how lucky Hora and I had been.

  My father was made only a little less anxious by our exploits on the water. Late one afternoon Hora and I were becalmed considerably further from our launching spot than we had ever travelled before. With no paddles, we were stuck. When evening came we knew we had no choice but to swim to shore, pulling the boat behind us, and then to walk the five or six kilometres to Frogmore. I shall never forget that night because we had to walk through long paddocks of dry Scotch thistles, some as high as my waist, barefoot and with only our swimming trunks. Until we became numb, only the searchlights sweeping across the reservoir near the main wall distracted us from our pain. When we reached the road we met my father beside himself with anxiety and angry with us both. He had called the police from Maldon. The lights we had seen were searching for us.

  Hora often told me stories as we sailed. As I grew older, the stories changed from adventure tales to accounts of the deeds of great men or great humanitarians. Of Albert Schweitzer, who, already a famous theologian and organist, studied medicine in early middle-age and went to Africa to build a hospital in which he cared for those who had not before enjoyed the benefits of Western medicine. Of Ignac Semmelweis, who tried to prove to his arrogantly dismissive peers that they were the cause of rampant childbed fever in maternity wards because they routinely went to their patients after dissecting cadavers without first washing their hands. To prove his theory, Semmelweis deliberately infected himself on a cadaver. He caught the fever, became insane, and jumped to his death from a bridge over the Danube. Hora also told me of a research scientist who was so poor that he could only afford a room so small that he had to open the window to put his elbows through whenever he put on his jacket.

  Hora’s stories were always of men with ideals, devoted to science or to humanity, and who were persecuted by an arrogant and complacent establishment that cried ‘Humbug’ when they made great discoveries in science (usually medicine) or philosophy, or when human decency was slowly advanced. Schweitzer was scorned by his fellow Lutheran clerics, Semmelweis by the medical establishment, Bertrand Russell by the political and academic establishment during World War I and later by the Catholics in New York. Like many East Europeans who saw much corruption in the church, Hora was ferociously anticlerical. He spoke, however, with respect and affection for Christianity’s ethical vision and for those rare people in whose lives he had seen it practised.

  Hora had a strong resonant voice and a fine ear for rhetorical pauses and emphases. He spoke with power and passion, his handsome, expressive face adding to the effect. I owe to Hora the development of my interest in ideas. Inclinations to delinquency ran strong in me at the time. At a certain point in my teenage years, intellectual interests ran stronger than they did. More than anyone else, I owe that and the course of my life to Hora.

  When Hora was at Frogmore he and my father often talked into the early hours of the morning, the kitchen filled with cigarette smoke and the smell of slivovitz.They talked to each other in Romanian, which I understood reasonably, but could not speak. To me they spoke in German until my teenage years when, to accommodate my foolish embarrassment, they spoke to me in English. Their individuality was inseparable from their talk—it was revealed in it and made by it, by its honesty. I learned from them the connection between individuality and character and the connection between these and the possibility of ‘having something to say’, of seeing another person as being fully and distinctively another perspective on the world. Which is to say that I learned from them the connection between conversation and Otherness.

  Hora’s openness to the voices of others when they spoke with disciplined honesty from their own experiences showed also in his reading. He read, as few people do, with an openness to the possibility of being radically altered. Many years after our time at Frogmore, he told me how shaken he had been when he read The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Hora believed himself to be a man with sufficient courage to die rather than betray his principles or other people. Suffering as he did, even though briefly, under communism he had often thought about the matter. Solzhenitsyn taught him that often people betrayed others not because they were cowards, but because they had slowly been corrupted through many compromises, none of which seemed very important in itself. Hora had never before seriously reflected on that. He had believed he would more or less suddenly be confronted with a dramatic decision, and was confident that in such circumstances he would act rightly. But now he did not know how he would act in circumstances such as Solzhenitsyn described. He was shaken for years, unable fully to recover his equilibrium, his understanding of himself seriously altered.

  The philosopher Plato said that those who love and seek wisdom are clinging in recollection to things they once saw. On many occasions in my life I have had the need to say, and thankfully have been able to say: I know what a good workman is; I know what an honest man is; I know what friendship is; I know because I remember these things in the person of my father, in the person of his friend Hora, and in the example of their friendship.

  In the summer of 1954, I went to Melbourne to spend some of my holidays with my mother and Mitru who were together again. My father put me on the tram at Moolort and my mother and Mitru were to meet me at Spencer Street station in Melbourne. They did not turn up, however, and after waiting an hour or so I went to the stationmaster who called the police. They were unable to contact my mother and so I was taken to St Kilda police station, where I slept the night.

  At first I was anxious, but the police distracted me by allowing me to play with their guns and to put on their caps until I fell asleep. Any boy would have been happy to play wit
h real guns, but I was even more happy to wear their caps.When I lived with my mother in Dalgety Street I was disappointed that Mitru had not been given a peaked cap though he worked at the lost property office at Spencer Street. Often when I went to see him, or for some other reason waited at the station, I asked whoever I saw wearing a peaked cap—railway officials, policemen, once an airman—if they would let me wear theirs for just a few moments. I suspect that I must have asked more than fifty people over time, yet not one allowed me to wear his cap. It is a small thing, but I remember it when I think of the fifties.

  I slept the night at the police station and in the morning my mother and Mitru came to collect me. I do not know why they failed to meet the train the previous day. They changed addresses often because my mother quarrelled with the landlord or because they fell in arrears with the rent. Perhaps my father had not kept pace with their changes and the address that I gave the police was out of date.

  They rented a small flat in Burnley, in a large Victorian house. My mother fell very ill with severe asthma attacks. I remember seeing her from outside, framed by the open window, sitting up in bed gasping for breath, her chest heaving as she vainly sought relief with the spray she inhaled. The perspective provoked in me a pity that was both intense and disturbingly detached. She also heard voices for which she suffered a course of electric-shock treatment that gave her no relief from the torments of her hallucinations. Mitru had to work and my mother was too ill to care for me. Again she went to hospital, for her asthma and for her psychosis, and I went back to Frogmore.

  I carried a letter with me from Mitru to my father, written in Romanian. It contained what Mitru called his ‘confession’ to my father, although I did not know that. I shall quote some of it to convey the quality of his sensibility.