As is the way with childhood, I look at that scene now and I doubt the exactness of my recollection. Memories get tumbled together like stones in this life, knocked together until they acquire a sort of polish, and hoarded into our own personal set of irregular gems. Our fingers slip along them, arranging and rearranging, sorting and rejecting.
I wonder whether this particular memory is burnished with retelling and revision, sealed under the cracked, fallible emulsion of old Polaroids. I wonder whether these elements are only here because they feel like they belong to the same strand of treasured, sentimental objects, beads and shells and teeth, strung together and counted through for comfort like a recited litany.
I observe them now, each shining smooth-edged piece, dense and solid and unerringly part of me. Here is the child running recklessly towards her father, the baby son running from him, the older sister hesitating between impulsiveness and the barricade, endlessly torn. Everything pivots on the tall uniformed man walking towards us all, his face stricken with all he would never speak of.
He grows larger as I run towards him, his face gathering more and more aching secrets into itself the closer I get. He’s holding in his hand a white folded handkerchief. Any moment, I think, he will shake it open, and raise it in surrender.
LIKE MY FATHER,
MY BROTHER
Michael Sala
My brother wants to know what I am writing about. I tell him that I am writing about him and me, when we were young. My brother has a quality that women used to find fascinating. I don’t know if they still do. It has something to do with the boyish glint in his eyes, the way it plays against his smile.
It reminds me of my father, who had that same youthful expression even when the wave of hair on his head was dead white and years of smoking had pulled his skin into an ashen mask around the angles of his cheeks.
We are standing together in a pub. My brother holds his drink in front of him like the host of some cocktail party, and his other hand is draped across the shoulders of his girlfriend. His girlfriend is pretty and polished, with glossy brown hair that shivers around her shoulders when she laughs. I have already noticed that she looks a lot more at my brother than he does at her.
My brother cocks his head, flashes his boyish grin at me and says, ‘I hope you haven’t portrayed me as some sort of monster.’
The first clear memory I have of watching him, my brother and I are not alone. He is kicking a ball, juggling it from one foot to the other. He does this effortlessly. I am watching him and my father at the same time. We are in the park. There is a naturalness to my brother’s movements that fills me with wonder. The ball looks as if it will never hit the ground. My father smokes a cigarette and stares at my brother as a pillar of ash lengthens on his cigarette. His mahogany eyes burn with an intensity that disappears when they turn my way.
In the pub, I am wearing a shirt that my brother gave me, and though I am skinnier than him, it strains across my chest. He stands there with his girlfriend and I sit on a barstool across from him. Another girl with a restless gaze and silky bob of dark hair sits beside me. Her name is Anna.
‘I feel like we are being watched,’ she tells me.
‘We are, but who cares.’
Anna’s glance stabs my way, but I don’t know how to read it. I have never been good at that sort of thing. I feel as if I am waiting on the starting block and I don’t know what to do with my body.
My brother suddenly steps close. ‘Mate, you need to loosen up a little.’
He says it loud, with that relaxed, boyish grin on his face. He undoes the top button of my shirt, and then the next one. ‘We have to bring out the Greek in you.’
A song comes on and he begins dancing. It’s a parody of dance but he doesn’t let go of the sexiness entirely. In the last few years, his features have shifted, as if an invisible river is wearing down the angles of his nose and cheeks, but his body is trim and black hair glistens at the opening of his shirt. His broad shoulders roll through the music. His girlfriend is giggling. My brother grins playfully as he dances but something is missing in the pose. I see not so much a boy, as a man pretending to be a boy. That too is something I remember of my father.
I am the last one to have seen my father, and that was more than twenty years ago. At the time, my mother had bargained him into paying for my ticket back to Holland, which we had left some years earlier, and where he still lived. He wanted to see my brother because he was the oldest and this mattered in Greek tradition, but my mother insisted that he should see me first.
My mother won her battle, but it was an uncomfortable victory. My father was the reason we had come to Australia. But in a strange country, married to a man that she didn’t love, my mother had grown homesick, and back then, she still had an overwhelming faith in the ability of people to change. ‘I can’t forget,’ she told us once, ‘that I used to love him very deeply. And, despite everything, he will always be your father.’
We disembarked at the airport in the middle of winter and my father picked me up while my mother went to stay with my grandmother. My father had changed a great deal since I had left Holland, physically at least. He looked skinnier than I remembered, less substantial. The colour had leached from his olive skin and his hair, black in my memory, now loomed above his forehead like an enormous drift of snow.
Something else had changed. I had always called him Daddy as a boy, not because I thought of him as my father but because I thought that was his name. But now I could only call him by his real name, the name that my mother used when she spoke of him in a tone of both sorrow and caution. I called him Phytos.
On the drive to his house I sat in the front seat, staring out at the flat landscape drenched in grey light, and it occurred to me that I had never been in the front seat of his car before. I was sitting in my brother’s place. After a long silence, Phytos told me that I looked like my mother.
Despite the cold, he drove with the car window down. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and smoke trailed from the wide, high arches of his nostrils. Phytos glanced at me again and I thought he was going to tell me something funny.
‘I have a surprise for you,’ he said.
When we got to his house, it turned out that the surprise was an old friend of mine, someone I had been a cub scout with as a boy. The two of us had made a pile of trouble once by going out of bounds during a camp. We had climbed into the attic of the building where we were staying and I had fallen through the roof. The boy’s name was Martin. He was fourteen now, only a year ahead of me, but he seemed much older.
Martin had lank blond hair and a thin, corded neck. He pulled a cigarette from the packet that my father offered, lit it, and showed me a really neat trick. He drew deep and exhaled into a tissue. Revealing the yellowish brown nicotine stain on the inside of the tissue, he told me with a cynical grin that this was why you shouldn’t smoke. He and my father chuckled like war veterans and they both pulled on their cigarettes.
Martin did karate. He was eager to demonstrate his training regime. He jerked his body through an elaborate series of moves and then showed me how to do short, sharp push-ups against a wall. Lots of repetitions, he told me, that was how you got speed in your punches. He did a hundred of those push-ups every day. His arms were milky, lean pillars of muscle. We all sat around a table and arm-wrestled. He could beat Phytos easily, but then so could I.
‘You’re growing up,’ Phytos told me in his oddly pitched English, still saturated with the Greek, ‘turning into a real man, an animal!’
I remembered that he used to call my brother an animal. I smiled back at him and didn’t say how surprised I was at his physical weakness. I had always imagined him as handsome, but there was a sunken quality to his face, particularly around his eye sockets, despite the brightness in his gaze.
Still breathing hard from his karate moves, Martin lit up another cigarette and turned to Phytos. ‘You should show Mike your videos.’
Phytos raised his ey
ebrows. ‘I think he’s a bit young for that sort of thing, aren’t you, Michael?’
‘I’m not too young at all,’ I said quickly.
‘Come on,’ Martin urged. ‘He can look away if he doesn’t like it.’
‘What would your mother think?’ Phytos stared at me with a gaze as smooth and polished as wood, his mouth hooked at one end as if we were sharing a private joke.
I told him that I didn’t care what my mother thought. She was far away, and I was a man now.
‘Just remember that a man doesn’t have to tell his mother everything,’ he said as he put on the video.
I sat on the couch beside Martin. The movie was foreign. I guessed that they were speaking German. We watched a woman in a nurse’s uniform put her hand inside another woman’s vagina.
‘Look at that.’ Martin leaned into his crossed arms and tensed his fists so that veins rose into the pale skin. ‘Yeah, give it to her.’
‘Don’t get ash on my couch,’ Phytos said, touching his head.
He put an ashtray beside Martin and kept on tidying the house, making sure that it was as clean and carefully ordered as the moment I had walked in. All of the walls were white. There were no pictures. The neatness of the place was disrupted only by a plant that had outgrown its pot. Its tendrils, thick as femoral arteries, shot along the window frame and up to the ceiling, and its fleshy leaves dangled along the architraves.
‘You have the best dad,’ Martin said suddenly.
I watched him briefly, swallowing and drawing at the cigarette between his wet lips, exhaling smoke through his nose the way my father did, then my eyes pulled back towards the television. I had a hard-on. I was grinning and the muscles of my cheeks strained at my jaw. My heart shuddered against the bottom of my throat. Most of all, I felt a shameful relief that my brother couldn’t see me.
You’re too young. This was something my brother said often when we were growing up. He said it once when we were standing beside a place shut off from the world by a tall barbed wire fence. Signs that said Keep Out and Danger hung along the fence, but my brother had found a slit cut into the wire and he held it open as he stared back at me. I told him what I always did, that I wasn’t too young at all, and he let me follow him.
I didn’t ask my brother what we were doing. I never did. We passed a shooting range, and long chains that looked like they were used to restrain dogs. Paths ran between oaks and pines and past concrete structures with locked metal doors. We came to a place where a huge old tree spread its branches beside a narrow road.
Nearby stood a building punctured by lights and I could see people moving around inside. I wanted to stay out of sight. A sea of tiny nuts lay around the tree facing us. My brother strolled forward, squatted in plain view and began eating them. He turned and looked at where I cowered in the bushes with a broad smile.
‘They taste good, Mike,’ he said.
I forgot everything and walked over to him. A man in an army uniform came riding past on a bike. When he saw us, he stumbled off his bike and ran towards us with a tight, focused expression. It was the kind of look that I’d seen on my stepfather’s face a hundred times. My brother was off. He yelled at me to run too. The man was surprisingly fast. When I felt his breath right behind me, I turned and tried to warn him off in a shrill tone. He seized me by the back of my shirt and carried me towards the building.
By the time my brother got home, it was dark outside and I sat at the dinner table with my mother and stepfather.
My stepfather shoved back his chair and looked him up and down. ‘Where have you been? What have you been up to?’
My stepfather was a large man, overweight, his hands stained with work and tar from the pipes he smoked. He had a way of standing right over us when he asked questions, his arms and shoulders locked as he waited for answers.
My brother glanced across at me. He had straight, dark hair and my father’s brown eyes that turned hard and flat in anger, though right now they were full of curiosity. He said that he’d lost me while we were out playing. My stepfather turned and I felt his gaze. We were eating sandwiches for dinner. I chewed on my sandwich and shrugged.
Later, as we lay on the separate levels of our bunk bed, I told my brother how I’d been made to sit in a room with fluorescent lights, a bunch of men in uniforms around me. The men had looked at me until I started crying. They had given me a glass of orange juice and a biscuit and told me never to come back.
‘I waited at the fence for hours,’ my brother said.
I thought that he’d pile abuse on me then for not having run quick enough, but he fell silent, and the silence grew long. It occurred to me suddenly that he was ashamed.
I knew that I had done the right thing by not telling. These were the important things; never to ask for explanations, never to talk about what we did. My brother and I shared a room. In the months after I was born, my brother had tried to bury me. He would scour the room for objects that he could pile into my cot: toys, clothes, footwear.
Later, he usually ignored me, but there were moments when he didn’t. My mother told him off once for carefully laying a packet full of drawing-pins, points upwards, in my bed. She said that it was his responsibility to look after me, that we only had each other.
My brother’s violence often came unexpectedly. He would turn with a sudden blankness in his eyes and punch me in the arms and the stomach and chest. Sometimes I would scream so that our stepfather would come in and hit us both, but often I kept quiet and so did he. I had seen my brother fighting at school. He beat people quickly and efficiently, no matter how much bigger or stronger they were, and while they were still nursing bloody noses, he’d be off doing something else, smiling like the whole thing had never happened.
It was the same with me. Not long after his attacks, he would come strolling back into view, preoccupied with something else, a pleasant grin on his face when he glanced in my direction. His whole expression would dazzle me, invite me to forget, and I would find it impossible to maintain my fury. But in the days that I spent alone with my father, I started to see the smile differently.
Towards the end of my stay, I bought a record with my father’s money. He had been giving me money the whole time as if neither of us really knew what else we should be doing together. I bought Queen’s Greatest Hits and played it full blast in his tidy, strangely empty house. He listened tolerantly the whole way through and watched with a kind of curiosity bordering on affection as I played air guitar.
Martin was there too, doing his endless repetitions of push-ups against the wall. When the last song finished, Phytos told me suddenly that he still cared about my mother, despite everything, despite what he had lost. Showing his perfect teeth, he said that she was a lovely person but just unstable, prone to imagining things that weren’t there—or, he added with a confident glance at Martin, things that had never happened.
When I returned to Australia, it was the height of summer. My brother didn’t ask much about Phytos. He had always seemed slightly bored by our father and his only disappointment appeared to be that he’d missed out on seeing his old friends. At first I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the trip at all, but then things began to loosen inside me.
‘Phytos says nothing happened,’ I told my brother a few weeks after my return.
At first I thought he hadn’t heard me. We were sitting on the couch. My brother was watching the cricket. He could sit in front of the television for hours when the cricket was on, and his face would grow empty and still.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked at last, without looking away from the television.
‘Between you and him. He says Mum made it all up.’
My brother laughed but he didn’t say anything. I mentioned seeing my friend Martin with Phytos quite a bit although I didn’t say what we’d watched together.
‘Yeah,’ my brother said. ‘Some of the guys on my soccer team used to hang at his house too. Even when I wasn’t around.’
He
turned and gave me a brief smile. He had a way of smiling without showing his teeth that had nothing to do with putting on charm.
By this stage, my father had phoned up a couple of times. The next time he phoned, my brother asked to speak to him.
‘Phytos.’ My brother spoke softly into the phone. He listened for a moment then said, ‘I hate your fucking guts. You’re a coward. Don’t call here again.’
He put down the phone and went into his room. He came out with his spearfishing gear.
‘It’s blowing a westerly,’ he said. ‘Bet you the water’s dead flat.’
I had been watching him jump off rocks into the sea for years. I would stand on the shore and glimpse him way out and alone in the turbulence of the sea and my stomach would churn. Dolphins dipped and cut through the water much closer to the shore than he was.
The first time he took me out spearfishing was during that summer. We plunged off the rocks and started paddling; out, it seemed, towards the tankers on the horizon. We paddled for twenty minutes, way past the shark nets. I couldn’t see the bottom; only islands of shadow and strange turns of light, and fish, longer than my arms, that slid past as if I didn’t exist.
Every now and again, my brother kicked down into the gloom and left me drifting above him in a cloud of bubbles. Alone, at the surface, I shivered and choked at each watery breath in my snorkel until I saw him rising towards me. Often, the carcass of a fish hung from his spear. He nearly always managed to shoot fish in the eye. When he was nearby, I would lift my head and stare back at the thin ribbon of the shoreline and yearn for it, but the thought of paddling back alone filled me with terror.
By the time we returned to shore, I couldn’t feel my hands or feet and my teeth chattered so fiercely that I thought they would shatter. I asked him whether he ever got scared out there by himself.
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