Romulus, My Father Page 9

  For that reason tragedy, with its calm pity for the affliction it depicts, was the genre that first attracted my passionate allegiance: I recognised in it the concepts that had illuminated the events of my childhood. They enabled me to see Mitru, my mother, my father and Vacek, living among his boulders, as the victims of misfortune, in their different ways broken by it, but never thereby diminished.

  That is why my heart broke when I saw my father in the ward before he saw us, in a room full of visibly disturbed people, some obviously insane, and he shrunken and bewildered. He had been given shock treatment and was one of those who felt it as a humiliating assault. Not everyone feels that way, but many do even when they concede that it is necessary. His pitiable state was increased by the effects of large doses of Largactil.

  He had not been expecting us and greeted us with surprised hesitation, ambivalent about my presence, pleased but mortified and, I think, humiliated. He protested that he was fine, that he was not really ill because he could ‘speak normally’ whenever he made the effort. I suspect he was quite oblivious to the pathos in that claim, because he repeated it many times to protest that he was not as ill as he might appear to be.

  I left the hospital changed. I had absorbed past sorrows against the sure confidence of my father’s strength. I knew that, whatever was to come, I could never do so again.

  I stayed a fortnight or so with Hora, but my father’s insanity cast its shadow over everything I did or thought. I did not see him again until I came home to Frogmore for the summer holidays. He had released himself from hospital almost two months before, and his paranoia was feverish. To protect me he tried to hide the signs of insanity as much as he could but it was impossible, for they were always visible and sometimes spectacular.

  Once, on the verandah, I saw his eyes wide with terror, his body trembling because he believed he could see a sheet of flame rise from the concrete and threaten to engulf both of us. He made wooden and iron crosses to ward off evil spirits and, when he cut the bread, he first crossed it with the knife. He questioned me without respite about the meaning of almost everything I did—why had I put the fork, the matches, my shoes just there, why did I stand or sit here rather than there, why did I write, say or wear this rather than that, and so on, relentlessly.

  There seemed to be no reason why he would single out some kinds of things rather than others. Anything slightly out of the ordinary was potentially a sign. They were of different kinds. Some were superstitions he learned in Yugoslavia. If an owl hooted it meant someone would die. He swore an owl hooted three times when my mother died. If his left eye beat it meant bad luck for someone. Always he feared for someone else, most often for me, but never for himself.

  He also invented elaborate and convoluted signs. Sometimes he would see five of something and connect it, via some intermediary occurrence, with the fact that ‘Gaita’ has five letters. Sometimes an English sound would be similar to the sound of a word in Romanian or German, and it would trigger a thought connected with the meaning of the word in those languages. Or he would focus on the number of letters in the word rather than its sound. The ingenuities of his associations left one with few means of escape from his anxious and sometimes aggressive attentions.

  Over time, by carefully doing nothing in ways that were even slightly out of the ordinary, I learned to minimise the extent to which I would provoke his anxiety, but such strategies were only partially successful against the resourceful manoeuvres of his paranoia. This was hard for me to bear, as it was for anyone in frequent contact with him. For him it was terrifying, not because he feared what would happen to him, but because he feared that he would drive away evil forces only for them to turn their fury on those he loved and who were less able to withstand their assault.To prevent this he had some months earlier tried to kill himself with an overdose of Largactil. By chance Tom Lillie came to the house at just that time to ask him to weld a broken gate, found him unconscious and took him to hospital.

  He was a passionate man and his madness was passionate. Its intensity became unbearable for me, and so for my own sake as well as his I urged him to go to hospital. He would not go. He said that he could not because the Christmas deliveries of his work were due, that they were the culmination of his year’s work and that a failure to deliver would cost him money and also, more seriously, his reputation. All this was true, but it did not really explain the quality of his refusal which was as ferocious as other aspects of his illness.

  We were arguing in the living room, next to Vacek’s room. Vacek had returned to help my father in his work. Far from sane himself, he joined me in urging my father to go, at first hesitantly but soon energetically, partly because the extent of my father’s illness was evident even to him, and partly because he saw it as an opportunity to free himself from my father’s relentless demands. My father was becoming desperate. He moved backwards away from us. We followed him and this must have appeared threatening to him because he picked up an axe and swore that he would cut our heads off if we came closer.

  Perhaps nothing indicates so clearly my sense of the seriousness of his illness than the fact that I was neither surprised nor dismayed. Not so my father. Within a few seconds, badly shaken by the realisation of what he was doing, he put down the axe, agreeing to go to hospital, on condition that he drive himself.

  Exacting this condition was important to his self-respect because it enabled him to believe that he still had some control over events, and for the same reason it was important to him that he admit himself as a voluntary patient rather than being taken forcibly and certified. He telephoned Jack Matthey, the policeman in Maldon, who came and accompanied him while my father drove to Ballarat. Matthey brought the car home and told me to put the keys away.

  I had promised my father that one way or another I would deliver his ironwork before Christmas. This was important, for financial reasons—we needed the money—for his reputation and also for his sense that things were not entirely out of control. His feeling, that he had delegated a task justifiably confident that it could be carried out, would be undermined if he had serious reason to think that I could not succeed in it. He therefore needed to be convinced that the physical means to do it were at my disposal, and also, even more importantly, that I could survive psychologically, a fourteen-year-old boy who had suffered considerable trauma, alone with only Vacek for a companion.

  To convince him I telephoned a school friend in Warrnambool asking him if he would come to Baringhup to help me. Amazingly he said that he would. Unsatisfactory as it would have been in other circumstances, this had to satisfy my father. It was a compromise between his need seriously to be convinced that I could deliver and his reluctant acknowledgment that he had to go to hospital.

  My school friend’s name was John Dunstan. His generosity deserves more than its mere recording, so I will say something of his short, sad life. An orphan, his uncle paid for him to live with family friends who cared for him with kindness and treated him as one of the family. His mother had committed suicide when he was a baby. He had two uncles, one poor, but kind and ineffectual, who spent his time fishing supported by the second uncle who was wealthy and brutish, but who, when all was said and done, fulfilled his responsibilities to John and was more than generous to his brother who appeared never to have seriously felt an obligation to work.

  John was wild and melancholic in turns, and at school was a loner, which was part of what attracted me to him. Neither academically gifted nor inclined, he left school after fifth form to work in a bank in Warrnambool. When I first went to university, I foolishly persuaded him to leave his job and to complete his secondary education in Melbourne so that he could go to university. He came to Melbourne, failed his matriculation, became lost and unstable and, four years later, jumped to his death from the housing commission flats in Carlton.

  But these terrible events were in the future. A week before Christmas, I met John at Maryborough station in my father’s utility which I had learned t
o drive six months or so before, sometimes with my father and sometimes by myself. He would leave the car parked outside the house and walk through the paddock to work at Lillie’s. The keys were always in the ignition, so I would start it and drive it for short distances along the track. This way I learned the gears and clutch control and, by the time my father decided to teach me, to his astonishment I needed only to practise steering on the roads.When John and I arrived at Frogmore, I took some pleasure in his amazement when he saw the outside of the house, and his even greater amazement when he saw inside.

  We left his suitcase at Frogmore and drove to Lillie’s to assess our task—the delivery within ten days or so of a couple of hundred garden settings and other items such as tables and magazine racks. My father had made high steel sidings to be attached to the tray of the utility, so that goods could be stacked to one and a half times its height, but, even so, we would need to do many trips. We sized up our task, lifting tables and chairs in order to assess how heavy they were, but also as a ritual to reassure ourselves and to placate the gods in case they suspected us of hubris. We agreed that we could do it and, for the first time since I had promised my father, I actually felt confident that we could.

  Dark had fallen by the time we came back to Frogmore. I lit the lamp and heated soup on the primus. Within moments of sitting down to talk we heard noises from the next room. Vacek had woken. He was asleep when we first arrived so John had not seen him, and I had forgotten both to tell John about him and that I hadn’t told him. I saw that John was a little anxious, but I assumed that was because he was alone with me in semi-darkness, in the primitive surroundings of Frogmore, kilometres from anywhere.

  Then we heard footsteps coining towards the kitchen and, before I realised the cause and extent of John’s fright,Vacek appeared at the kitchen door. Under his chin he held a kerosene lamp which partially illuminated his fully bearded face making it appear to float free of his body which was in darkness. His fearsome appearance was aggravated by his expression of confused irritation and by the fact that sleep had made his hair wild. John jumped under the table.

  Sensing himself to be the cause of this extraordinary event, but confused, because he didn’t know who John was, because he could not understand why he should cause such a reaction in anyone, and because he was anyhow a little mad, Vacek put the lamp on the table and peered under it, muttering apologies and explanations, none of which made much sense. Nor, I suspect, did John hear any of it because, at the sight of Vacek’s head under the table, he ran out of the house into the darkness of the paddock. It took hours for him to settle.

  After we made the first delivery without him, Vacek realised that we had no real need of him and went, I do not know where. I was sad to see him go; I felt for him as though he were part of my family, but I also knew that such coming and going was part of his nature. And it was true that he was not needed. He could have helped load and unload the utility, but it would have saved us only an hour or two each time. John and I managed by ourselves and completed all our deliveries to Myer stores in Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong within a day or two of the dates my father had promised.

  Our duty done, John and I were restless. We were teenagers with no desire to spend our time at Frogmore, swimming or reading, although in the event we did quite a lot of that. We drove around aimlessly, to Maryborough and other towns, sometimes racing local lads in the utility at speeds that should have killed us all. One night we drove to Castlemaine where we took a room at a hotel, hoping to bring girls there. Although we had in the car and the hotel room trappings of sophistication well beyond our age, we had little more and we had no idea how actually to go about getting the girls we lusted after. We spent a forlorn Christmas day, searching without luck for anything that looked like a public celebration we could join.

  When Jack Matthey’s blue Holden arrived at Frogmore our travelling came to an end. On the previous day workmen had been tarring the road to Baringhup, both sides at once. Before I quite realised what I was doing, I drove through their work at speed, spraying them with tar. In the rear-vision mirror I saw them shaking their fists. John and I raised our thumbs in return. That evening they filed a report at the Maldon police station.

  When he came it was clear that Matthey had known for some time that I had been driving. He had decided to turn a blind eye because he knew that my father was in hospital and that, in the beginning at least, I was driving in order to complete his deliveries. Now I had forced his hand; he had no alternative. He told me that I had been an idiot, took the car keys and left it at that. I was astonished that he had not arrested me, for he had a fearsome reputation for seeking out law-breakers and for mercilessly enforcing the letter of the law against them.

  A few months later he caught me driving again. Furious that I had not been deterred by his warning, and perhaps because I had abused his generosity, he threatened to see me and my father in jail. When the case came before the children’s court in Maldon, Matthey pleaded on my behalf saying that this was a case of ‘good people doing the wrong thing’, that I was a poor boy who had to ride a bicycle four miles to get an ice-cream, that my father was a good hard-working man and so on. I was fined one pound for driving, my father two pounds for letting me and the magistrate said no conviction would be recorded. I am sure that we owed this generosity to Matthey’s plea on our behalf. His normally fearsome reputation served us well.

  When my father came home from hospital in mid-January, John returned to Warrnambool. Vacek also came home—for by then that is what Frogmore was to him—and he and my father began working again. The stores had sold out of garden settings and had placed urgent orders for more. He was far from cured of his illness: his paranoia, his disposition to see omens everywhere, even his hallucinations persisted, but nothing seemed so fierce as before, about to consume him and everyone around him. Relief lasted only a few weeks, however, and I thought it an ominous sign when he asked me to cut his hair completely off.

  A few weeks later he visited me at school in Ballarat with Vacek. As soon as I saw him I knew that his illness had again overtaken him. He came dressed in a dishevelled navy pin-striped suit, with a dirty white shirt open at the neck, the collar partly covered by the collar of his jacket. He seemed shrunken, stooped, not with age (he was only thirty-nine), but with the burden of his affliction. Most startling was his face: thin, unshaven, his eyes, not dead as is often the case with depression, but burning with the terror of his visions, all made worse by the fact that his almost shaven head made him look as though he had come from a concentration camp.

  Vacek walked beside him in an equally shabby beige suit and an open dirty shirt, wearing, as ever, his beanie. He no longer had a beard, and his open, amiable face was covered in stubble. His eyes focused on no one, his lips were hardly ever still, moving in sometimes silent, sometimes audible conversation with himself or imaginary partners. Afterwards a teacher asked me if one of the men had been my father. ‘No,’ I replied. I was later tormented with guilt and shame for having denied my father, but I knew not quite for what I was ashamed because I also knew that, terrible though it was, my denial was not prompted by cowardice.

  I do not know what set my father on the very long road to recovery. He singles out an event that occurred while I was with him during the May holidays of 1961.

  ‘Come Raimond,’ he said to me late one afternoon. ‘We’re going to Sydney.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, surprised at the suddenness of this announcement.

  He hesitated for a moment and then said, ‘I’m going to shoot him.’

  I knew he meant Lydia’s husband. He and Lydia had come to Sydney only months before. My father’s mind was made up and I knew that nothing I could do or say would change it. Lamely, I asked whether he thought it a good idea. He dismissed my question with a contemptuous grunt and gesture of his hand.

  I was not morally appalled by what my father was setting out to do. Mitru’s suicide and my father’s madness had convinced me that sexua
l love was a passion whose force and nature was mysterious, and that anyone who came under its sway should be prepared to be destroyed by it. Its capacity to wreck lives, to humiliate otherwise strong and proud people and to drive them to suicide was already familiar to me. That it should also drive them to murder was part of the same story.

  I had long felt that a person passionately in love was in the grip of something whose imperatives required one to accept, without complaint, that one might be murdered by a grief-stricken or jealous lover. The requirement to consent to such possibilities seemed to me to be intrinsic to love’s nature and, therefore, inseparable from its joys. To my mind that requirement constituted the very essence of this awesome passion. I believed, moreover, that Lydia’s cold-blooded mendacity’ was contemptible in a way that my father’s intention to kill her husband, and perhaps her, was not. Not that I believed that this would justify my father if he killed them. I did not believe they deserved to die— certainly not at anyone else’s hand, and not even at my father’s. For me it was never a question of justification. I simply refused to condemn my father for intending to shoot Lydia’s husband.

  That refusal was not conditional on him being my father. I would have refused to condemn anyone in a similar position to his, and I would have thought any victim of such a killing to be unworthy of their passion if they complained. The fact that he was my father was the reason I felt obliged to accompany him. It never occurred to me to say I would not go. But I also accepted that he might quite rightly pay the legal penalty, go to jail and perhaps even be hanged for murder.

  We shared the driving and arrived at Lydia’s house early in the morning, around seven o’clock. My father said that we should wait until a more suitable time before knocking at their door. This courtesy struck me as incongruous with our purpose, and I did not know whether to take it as a sign that my father had abandoned his plan, or that his natural courtesy showed through even when he was intent on murder.