Romulus, My Father Read online

  ‘Of course,’ the priest replied. ‘He’s not a dog, he’s a human being.’

  Mourners, many of whom were friends of both brothers and of my mother, came from Melbourne. Mitru lay in an open coffin, his face broken and dark purple with bruising. People took photographs, close up, almost next to his face. The memory of it haunted me for years. My mother came to the graveside with her friends and stood separately, weeping bitterly. After the funeral, mourners gathered for drinks at the Foschias’. I remember Hora at a distance from the gathering, his face twisted in grief and with what I read as despair.

  No one knows why Mitru killed himself. There can be no doubt that the strain of living with my mother was the main reason for his desperate state of mind. At the inquest my mother testified that when she suggested that it might be better for them to part than to quarrel so bitterly, he replied that he could not live without her and the baby. and that if she left he would kill himself. My father believed that Mitru felt humiliated by the fact that my father had paid his and my mother’s rent, and even more because my father did not strike back when Mitru hit him. Hora believed Mitru feared that one day out of anger and frustration he would beat my mother again and that, goaded further by her taunts, would actually kill her. Rather than have her death and the death of the child she was carrying on his conscience, he killed himself. Mitru believed in an afterlife and a last judgment, but he believed that the judgment you passed was on yourself, that it was inescapable because it was intrinsic to your acknowledgment of your guilt, and that you were eternally answerable to it.

  Very likely my mother, my father and Hora were all partly right. In his own eyes Mitru was a wretched man. He had taken the wife of a friend before whom he felt guilty and humiliated. His wrongdoing was unredeemed, for it brought happiness to no one and much misery. I do not know how often he beat my mother, but I know that he would have been mortified and frightened by his capacity for such violence. He could not leave her; he loved her too much. It is likely that he felt that it was better to die than to compound the guilt, the shame and the misery with murder. He was twenty-seven. A stone cross marks his grave. It carries the epitaph, CREDINTA IN ZELELE DE APOI / E SINGURA NADEJDE IN NOI (Belief in the afterlife is the only hope in us).

  For some time after Mitru’s death my father was distant and preoccupied, brooding on his and my mother’s parts in it. I felt his absence and once, when he smacked me, I shouted from the bedroom to where I had retreated, ‘You don’t love me.’

  He came to the door and stood there, very serious, looking at me for some time. ‘Do you believe that? Do you really?’ he asked.

  I shrugged, turned away from him and said, ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t believe it, but I told him that I did because I had registered the effect of my accusation on him and I wanted to make the most of it. He went away obviously troubled.

  I thought nothing more of it until that weekend when I had reason to regret my words bitterly.We were in Maryborough intending to go to the pictures. As was often the case, we went late in the afternoon so that my father could first visit friends. Whenever I could, I avoided these visits because I found them boring, especially as the conversation would be in Romanian,Yugoslav, Polish or Italian. I wandered about Maryborough and sometimes went to the Foschias’ for dinner. My father and I would meet at the cinema after the film. He seldom came until the second feature, and sometimes not until the end.

  I was at the Foschias’ on this occasion when the telephone rang around six. Mr Foschia called me to the phone. It was the Maryborough hospital. My father had been in an accident. His motorbike had collided with a car. Could I come straightaway?

  When I arrived at the hospital I had to wait for over half an hour. I heard loud moaning and gurgling in someone’s throat and chest as though they were drowning in their blood. I prayed it was not my father.When a nurse took me to see him, I knew the sounds came from him. He had severe head injuries. His face was bruised and covered in dried blood and his nose was broken. I remembered Mitru in his coffin. A tube in my father’s mouth had been responsible for the sounds I had heard. He tried a number of times to speak and eventually succeeded, each word causing him severe pain. ‘Never believe that I don’t love you.’ That was all he said to me that evening.

  After a month or so when he recovered physically, his work brought my father again into spiritual equilibrium. Never willingly an early riser, he went to Tom Lillie’s blacksmith shop at nine, and then worked late into the night, until ten or eleven, and on most weekends. He would occasionally watch an hour or so of television when the Lillies bought a set, but he was happiest in his workshop, spending little time at Frogmore. He played Romanian and Yugoslav records on a record player in the middle of the workshop, singing along with them. He was fond of crooners, particularly of Dean Martin for his easygoing style, but he admired Bing Crosby more for his capacity suddenly to hit a low note.

  I have never seen a workman as skilled as my father. His unboastful confidence in what he could do impressed me as much as his achievements. He was so at ease with his materials and always so respectful of their nature that they seemed in friendship with him, as though consenting to his touch rather than subjugated by him.

  This extended beyond his ironwork. He made the jeans we wore and for both of us good, ‘Sunday’ trousers. He mended and made shoes. As an expression of gratitude to a woman who had been kind to him he made a beautiful lace curtain, the lace included. From old sheep bones he found in the paddocks he made cigarette holders and handles for the knives he also made. He carved wood and later in his life made himself a lathe on which he crafted a fine spinning wheel with which he spun wool.

  He repaired almost everything: motorbikes, cars, welders and clocks, often making the tools and parts, including the clockwork parts, himself. He was a superb welder and his reputation spread among the farmers in the region. When they brought him something to weld he said, ‘If this breaks, it will not break where I weld. It will break somewhere else.’ Invariably he was right. In those days he welded only with oxyacetylene, using a piece of baling wire.

  His work both expressed and formed much of his character. From him I learned the relation between work and character. His sense of the importance of work and of its moral and spiritual requirements was simple and noble. Like him, his work was honest through and through. He worked at great speed, able to cut steel by sight to within a millimetre, yet everything was perfectly made. If there was a fault, as sometimes occurred because of the qualities of his material, or because, as happened later, one of his workmen was careless, he took immediate and full responsibility. He accepted responsibility because he believed that it was the duty of an honest person to do so. It was inconceivable to him that he should do so, because, for example, it would rebound on him if he did not—as inconceivable as that he should be truthful for similar reasons. He regarded such prudential justifications that honesty pays, for example—as shabby. The refusal of such justifications was for him and for Hora the mark of our humanity.

  Gradually his reputation as a workman spread to neighbouring towns. Friendly shopkeepers allowed him to display his work in their windows and he exhibited in local shows in Maldon, Maryborough, Castlemaine, Bendigo and Ballarat. Through such publicity and by word of mouth his work became admired and his business prospered.

  He was deeply gratified that his work, and he through it, should become respected. Many times he told me that there are few things more important than a good name. Again, his reasons were not prudential. He took pleasure only in the esteem of those whom he knew to be deserving to judge him and his work. The praise of the lazy, the dishonest or those whose character and work were shoddy meant nothing to him.

  In this respect he belonged to a long tradition of European thought which celebrated, as an essential constituent of a fulfilled human life, a community of equals, each worthy to rejoice in the virtues and achievements of the other.

  My father would have taken pleasure in his
good name anywhere, but he had an additional reason for it in Baringhup. Those were the days before multiculturalism—immigrants were tolerated, but seldom accorded the respect they deserved. It occurred to few of the men and women of central Victoria that the foreigners in their midst might live their lives and judge their surroundings in the light of standards which were equal and sometimes superior to theirs. That is why it never seriously occurred to them to call my father by his name, Romulus. They called him Jack.

  Both Hora and my father were appreciative of the tolerance shown to them by Australians, and both knew it to be greater than could be expected in most European nations. Hora felt this especially strongly because he had rebelled against communist rule in Romania and suffered for it. For a long time he found it hard fully to believe that there could exist such freedom and tolerance as he found in Australia. He sometimes expressed this in comical ways. When Jack the cockatoo shat in the house or in other ways indulged his inclination to assert ownership of it, Hora laughed and exclaimed, ‘That’s right. That how it is. It’s Demo-kra-cy!’ Nonetheless, for proud men such as they were, the condescension of their neighbours must have rankled.

  They were not proud in any sense that implies arrogance, and certainly not in any sense that implies they wanted respect for reasons other than their serious attempt to live decently. I have never known anyone who lived so passionately, as did these two friends, the belief that nothing matters so much in life as to live it decently. Nor have I known anyone so resistant and contemptuous, throughout their lives, of the external signs of status and prestige. They recognised this in each other, and it formed the basis of their deep and lifelong friendship. But I know from their disappointments that they longed for a community of honourable men and women who humbly, but without humbug, knew their own worth and the worth of others.

  Character—or karacter as they pronounced it, with the emphasis on the second syllable—was the central moral concept for my father and Hora. It stood for a settled disposition for which it was possible rightly to admire someone. The men and women in Baringhup and its surroundings in the fifties respected character, even when, rarely, they had little of it themselves. Honesty, loyalty, courage, charity (taken as a preparedness to help others in need) and a capacity for hard work were the virtues most prized by the men and women I knew then.

  In their words and actions they expressed a suspicion of personality because they believed it to be superficial and changeable. Theirs was a puritanical conception of human possibilities, but its tendency to be dour was relieved by an idea that belonged to the same stable as that of character. It was the notion of a character and, like its parent, it suggested something steady and deep in a person. It was possible to be a character while living a hermit’s life in the bush, but one could not be a personality that way.They thought a dazzling personality was merely the false semblance of real individuality as it displayed itself in the person who had become a character.

  Tom Lillie and others disliked my mother partly because they saw her engaging vivacity as a dangerously seductive manifestation of personality in a woman they believed to be lacking entirely in character—a ‘characterless woman’ as Hora put it. Miss Collard, by comparison, had character and was a character. Mrs Lillie had character but was less of a character than her sister because of her desire to be ‘proper’, a ‘respectable’ wife to a man with a distinguished name in the farming community. Perhaps that is why I once surprised Tom with Miss Collard on his knee.

  Such was the division of the human spirit in that part of the world at that time. Like other sharp divisions, it could not capture the many worthy ways of being human. It nourished some possibilities, maimed others and would not allow some even to see the light of day. Women particularly suffered under it. Its tendency to puritanism was probably ineradicable, closing off the perspective from which men could unreservedly glory in feminine beauty and grace. It offered to women ideals of femininity cut off from sensuality, and so, paradoxically, offered them an ideal of femininity that undermined their potential truly to be women.

  Perhaps that is why women at that time and in that place were especially vulnerable to the deadening attractions of middle-class respectability. Foreign women, with historically deeper and more complex traditions of womanhood still alive in them, tended to manage better. They were also attracted to wealth more for reasons connected with status than with greed, but for many of the East Europeans a tendency to vulgarity countered any inclination they had to turn the achievement of status into an ersatz morality.

  But for someone like my mother, highly intelligent, deeply sensuous, anarchic and unstable, this emphasis on character, given an Australian accent, provided the wrong conceptual environment for her to find herself and for others to understand her. Tom Lillie’s contempt for her was common. It was also emblematic of a culture whose limitations were partly the reason she could not overcome hers.

  One Anzac Day I heard on the radio a poem written by an English poet during World War II. It was a hymn of praise to the qualities that earned Australian soldiers the affection and respect of the people of so many nations. I recognised the men whose virtues the poet celebrated. They were the men I had met in my childhood in Baringhup. The contempt for my mother, which was partly the cause of her failings as much as it was a response to them, was the unattractive side of a conception of value whose other side nourished a distinctively Australian decency. The glories and the miseries of that particular realisation of decency were evident in the men and women of Baringhup and its surroundings.

  Around the middle of 1957, my father started writing to woman in Yugoslavia. Her name was Lydia. She was in her early twenties, tall, slim, dark and very beautiful. He had obtained her address, particulars and photograph from a lonely hearts club especially for Yugoslavs and Romanians.

  I do not know why he did this. He was a handsome man and attractive to women, many of whom flirted openly with him, even in my presence. Perhaps it started as a form of amusement but soon it became serious. They wrote at least twice a week and before long there was talk of marriage, and plans for him to bring her, her mother and her brother to Australia. In a culture used to arranged marriages that is not particularly significant. But, as well as intending to marry her, it looked as though he had fallen hopelessly in love with her. The distinction we rightly make between real love and its many false semblances makes me hesitate to say that he actually was in love with her, for, after all, he had never met her. But anyone who saw him, then or later, would have felt an overwhelming inclination to say that he was passionately in love.

  I do not remember him more happy. He was young, only thirty-five, strong, respected, joyful in his work, at home with the natural as much as the human world, and he was about to marry a young woman who looked like a film star. His work engrossed him, his business prospered, his friendships flourished. It is small wonder that he was always whistling or singing.

  It was a joyful period for me too. It had to do with my father’s happiness, but I also had my own reasons. At the beginning of the summer of 1957–58 he allowed me to ride the Bantam, at first only in the paddocks, but later on the roads and eventually to Baringhup. He allowed me because I pestered him daily, but he also had an ulterior motive: he wanted me to collect Lydia’s letters from the post office in Baringhup.

  Riding the motorbike that summer, through the hot yellow grasslands of central Victoria and around the expansive waters of Cairn Curran, wearing only shorts and sandals, crystallised in me a sense of freedom that I possessed earlier, but never so fully, and which I always associate with that time in the country. I felt I could do anything provided I was respectful of others. The law and other kinds of regulations seemed only rules of thumb, regulative ideals, to be interpreted by individuals according to circumstances and constrained by goodwill and commonsense. From my father and from Hora I had already acquired a sense that only morality was absolute because some of its demands were non-negotiable. But I was too young to be
troubled by that. I was eleven years old, riding my father’s motorbike to collect the mail and visit friends, yet no one was troubled by this breach of the law. It left me with a sad, haunting image of a freedom, impossible now to realise, and which even then the world could barely afford.

  In February of 1958 I went as a boarder to St Patrick’s College in Ballarat. It was run by the Christian Brothers, but religion did not figure in my father’s reason for sending me there. Dominic Foschia had been there for four years and his parents convinced my father that it was a good school, academically better than anything on offer locally.

  I had not seen or heard from my mother since Mitru’s funeral. She had placed Susan in a home in Melbourne where she went to live. Soon after, Barbara was born, in July 1956, four months after her father had killed himself. My mother placed her in a home too. Poor, in money and in health, she lived in various rooming houses and worked mostly as a home helper or kitchen hand. She visited the girls in their different institutions and occasionally had one or both of them to stay with her. She was required to contribute towards their maintenance (in the case of Susan this was £1 10s per week). When she fell behind in her payments she was warned, without compassion or regret, that if she fell four weeks behind, the children would be made wards of the state. This happened towards the end of 1957.

  She was very distressed, first at the prospect and then at the fact, that the girls were made wards of the state. But for reasons to do with her nature, and to the extent that it can be separated, with her psychological illness, she was unable to marshal the will to save sufficient money to meet the payments, or even to appear often enough to plead her case. Not that she would have been treated with sympathy if she had.The matron at the Presbyterian Babies Home, where both girls were eventually placed, pending transfer to a Roman Catholic home, declared my mother to be ‘a hopeless case’ and denied her the right to have her children with her except on weekends, and even that exception was granted grudgingly. Towards the middle of 1958 my mother went again to Ballarat to admit herself as a daypatient at a psychiatric clinic and to work as a polisher in a shoe factory.