Romulus, My Father

by Gaita, Raimond

  We waited almost two hours before we knocked on the door. Lydia opened it. She was even more beautiful than her photographs, gentle in every movement and in her speech, as delicate in manner as in her tall, slim, graceful figure. It was impossible to see the wickedness in her. Her husband was also gentle and courteous. His courtesy must have disarmed my father, but it was her beauty that saved him from death and my father from becoming a murderer. There were no shots, not even very angry words. I do not know what they talked about for they spoke in Yugoslav, which I did not understand. After some hours of talk my father and I set off for home.

  I was profoundly relieved when we went because I had fully expected to spend that evening in a children’s home while my father was sent to prison. But as deep as my relief was, so was my pity for my father because of his suffering and humiliated love for this beautiful woman.

  On the road home we passed some cliffs on a hillside a kilometre or so from the road. They caught my interest and I looked at them for some time.Years later my father told me he thought I intended to indicate to him that he would do me and others a service if he went to those cliffs and jumped off. He said that, because I could not be blamed for wishing it, he found in his shame the strength to begin the long haul to recovery.

  I have seldom seen such affliction as I saw my father suffer in those last years in Frogmore, and I only saw it again when I worked as a student in psychiatric hospitals. He understood it before he became its victim. Some years before, while we were travelling on the motorbike, he talked about Vacek and said, ‘There is no sickness worse than mental sickness.’

  I remember his words clearly. I remember the exact point where we were on the road. Most of all, I remember his strong, bare, sun-darkened arms on either side of me as I sat on the petrol tank. For me to remember his words and our surroundings so vividly, the authority with which he spoke them must have impressed me deeply. The sight of his muscular arms protected me against their terrible meaning.

  During the severe period of his illness my father quarrelled with many of his friends and also with those he employed to work for him.

  After electric welding, a thin metal crust forms over the weld which needs to be removed before painting. This is done first by grinding and then by cleaning off the residue with a steel brush. Stan Smolak came from Maldon to grind the welding residue from the garden settings and to help my father when he was painting.

  My father would question him as to why he had done something this way rather than that, and often whatever Smolak said in reply provoked my father to anxious and paranoid outbursts.

  He sometimes refused to work because he believed that omens told him not to. On one occasion Smolak arrived at the workshop, but not finding my father there he went to Frogmore in search of him. There he found him in bed. My father told Smolak that Jack had scratched a certain pattern in the dirt which meant that he had scratched away that day’s work. ‘No work today,’ my father said. He paid Smolak his petrol money and went back to bed.

  Eventually even the equitable Vacek had had enough, and one day when my father, quite reasonably on this occasion, asked him to grind the welding residues in a particular way, Vacek threw down the grinder and declared he was leaving. Despite my father’s plea that he wait at least until the end of the week, Vacek refused to stay another hour. He went home to Frogmore, packed his entire belongings in a small bag and set off on his motorbike, this time never to return.

  He wandered from town to town, and for a while returned to his boulders outside Maldon. But times had become less tolerant since he had first lived there seven years earlier, and the police took him to the Ballarat psychiatric hospital, where he became a certified patient for no better reason than that he lived between boulders, talked to himself and sometimes cooked food in his urine. Over time he became dependent on institutional living so that, even when he was free to leave, he preferred to stay, and remained there and in reception homes in the community for the rest of his life.

  Hora also quarrelled with my father. After Mitru died he went to Sydney in the hope that physical distance from the tragedy would enable him to find the emotional distance he needed to come to terms with it. It was not to be. In Sydney he met and fell deeply but unhappily in love with a young woman whom he hoped to marry. She refused him because she had had one lung removed, diseased with tuberculosis. She feared the recurrence of her illness, that she would be unable to have children and that she would therefore bring only sorrow to the man she married. Hora protested without success. He had no choice but to accept her resolve not to burden him with marriage to an invalid.

  My father told me that the pain of this loss affected Hora for years. He always spoke of it in a tone which expressed sorrow for Hora and his awe at our vulnerability to affliction.

  Absorbed in his sorrows, Hora had his patience severely tried by my father who sometimes regarded him as a kind of chief wizard in a complicated play of supernatural forces. Although this was a backhanded expression of my father’s admiration for him, Hora was understandably hurt to be cast in this role. Realising how much his presence disturbed my father, Hora suggested that they see less of each other and they were estranged for almost two years. They also quarrelled over something more serious.

  Soon after my father had been released from his first stay at the Ballarat psychiatric hospital, he received a letter calling him to Melbourne to discuss urgently the fate of Susan and Barbara. He was in fact called to consent to their adoption. Realising there was now no hope that he, Hora or any other members of the family could adopt the girls, he signed a letter of consent, pleading that Hora and I have access to them. Because he had no legal standing, Hora was not present and his consent was not sought.

  Despite my father’s claim that he could ‘speak normally’ whenever he set his mind to it, it must have been evident to the authorities at the children’s home that they were asking for the signature of a highly disturbed man whom they knew had been released from a psychiatric hospital only a couple of months before. Yet it is clear from the official papers that they were determined to obtain his signature if at all possible. The fact that this signature, extracted from a person who was mentally ill, was of doubtful legal standing was, I suppose, a risk they thought worth taking, predicting that my father would not cause trouble over it later.

  After he signed the papers, my father went to visit Hora in Prahran. Hora was bitterly unhappy about the adoption. Partly because of previous tensions, and partly because of the drink with which he tried to ease his sorrows, he quarrelled angrily with my father because my father had given his consent without any assurance that those who intended to adopt the girls would agree to allow them to see him, Hora or me.

  Hora knew that access was at the discretion of the adopting couple. Previously, when a couple had sought to adopt the girls, they allowed him to visit them on weekends when they had them for trial periods. The couple assured Hora that if they were permitted to adopt the girls they would welcome his visits and mine. But the girls were transferred to a Roman Catholic home and, because both the husband and wife were Anglicans, they were refused permission to adopt them.

  Hora was very fond of the girls. He visited them regularly and was deeply distressed by their plight, Susan’s in particular because she repeatedly banged her head against the wall or against the bedstead at night. On the day they were adopted, he went to see them for the last time. He stood with them waiting for the car to take them away. When it arrived, the girls were rushed inside, and the people who adopted them neither greeted Hora nor said farewell to him. They offered not a word of reassurance or sympathy, though they knew who he was and how often he had visited them.

  He was left standing at the kerb as they sped off and did not see the girls again until over thirty years later when I tracked them down.

  Despite their quarrels, Hora and my father remained friends, but friends apart. This was because of the strength of old bonds, because Hora knew that it was my father’s
illness that caused him to act as he did, but mostly because Hora knew that, despite his illness, there was still no one who remained as steadfast as my father in his disdain of superficialities, in his honesty and in his concern for others. Though he was often impossible to be with, and provoked quarrels with almost anyone who was not a saint, his essential character remained untouched by his illness. Later, when his illness relaxed its grip and he was in control of the imaginings which still afflicted him, but which he did not voice so aggressively or with such anguish, their friendship revived.

  My father seldom properly understood his part in their quarrels, which was not surprising given the seriousness of his illness. But his lack of self-knowledge about this was complicated by something that became evident to me only later, because it needed to be isolated from his illness in order to be fully visible. He often defended himself against someone’s anger by saying that all he did or said was such and such, whereupon there followed an account of what he had said or done which was both inaccurate and in his favour. He was not lying. I never knew my father to lie. He was deceiving himself and, although the phenomenon is commonplace, in him it was puzzling because he appeared to lack the concept of self-deception entirely.

  At first his illness disguised this from me. But even after I knew that his illness could not explain this curious untruthfulness of a scrupulously honest man, it took some years for me to understand this aspect of my father. Despite the paradoxical nature of the fact that the same person can simultaneously be deceiver and deceived, the concept of self-deception goes so deep in our culture that it never occurred to me that anyone might simply not possess it. When I realised that my father did not, it added pathos to his self-deception, but also made it more frustrating because I knew that I was powerless in the face of it. When once I told him that there were other ways of being untruthful than by lying, that one might be untruthful to oneself, he clearly had no idea what I was talking about and could find no familiar conceptual path to doing so.

  In a man for whom truthfulness mattered so much, this was a pathetic state of affairs. I have already remarked how both my father and Hora looked upon prudential justifications of truthfulness and other virtues as demeaning of our humanity. They did not value truthfulness for its usefulness. They valued it because, to adapt the words of a fine English philosopher, they were men for whom not to falsify had become a spiritual demeanour.

  By the middle of 1962 I convinced my father to accept an offer to buy a modest weatherboard house from a friend in Maryborough. I suspect that I succeeded in convincing him because he knew in his heart that he would never build the house he had intended for Lydia, although the plans were drawn up, the bricks were all on site and the foundations dug. Nothing now prevented him from engaging the bricklayers, whom he knew and who had agreed to do it. Sensing that he had a psychological block against it, I pestered him to buy a house until eventually he did.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have because, although he lived in it until he died, he never cared for it, feeling always that he would have preferred to live in a house he built himself, while never according that preference sufficient weight to act on it. I think that long before he articulated it to himself and others, he felt that it was an indulgence to build a better house when he lived in one that was adequate. That feeling expressed an austerity which became deeper and more pervasive over time.

  As he grew older it became clear that the house he had bought was not only adequate, it suited his spartan disposition much better than a new house in which he would have seemed incongruous. It was small, with two bedrooms and a sleep-out on the verandah, but it had a very deep backyard looking out onto forest. He kept animals in the backyard and grew all manner of vegetables. Although the house was on the outskirts of Maryborough and surrounded by other houses, when one looked through the kitchen window one could easily imagine oneself to be in the bush.

  Something besides my pestering was at work in prompting my father to buy a house in Maryborough, and at the same time to make him disinclined to build the one he had intended for Lydia. Her mother and brother were soon to arrive in Australia. Their fares were paid not by Lydia and her husband, but by my father. He had promised to do it years before, and it was inconceivable that he would go back on his word, whatever Lydia had done to him and irrespective of whether her mother and her brother had been accomplices in her deception. Even if he had discovered that Lydia’s mother had urged her to lie to him, that they had concocted the whole scheme, he would not have gone back on his word. He had promised and that was binding on him. If they wanted to come he would bring them.

  Of course they did want to come.

  They arrived in Maryborough just before the end of 1962. She was an attractive, dark, middle-aged woman, who spoke almost no English. He was tall and good looking like Lydia, educated, eighteen or nineteen, and spoke a reasonable English that rapidly improved during his time in Maryborough. I am afraid that their names have completely escaped my memory. She stayed at home in the house while he quickly found a job as a typesetter at a local printing house. I felt no resentment towards either of them. Because I had already seen a fair number of unusual things, a slightly bizarre twist to the tale of my father’s life came as no surprise to me. Also, my childhood had prepared me to accept what came, as much for reasons of prudence as of virtue.

  In fact, I had little to do with Lydia’s mother and whatever reservations I had were overcome by my pleasure at a feminine presence in the house.They were both kind to me, and the brother especially took pains to spend time with me. He spoke to me for hours about the evils of communism, of the heroes of the Yugoslav and Hungarian resistance, and indicated that he would try to join Australian movements dedicated to overthrowing the communist government of Yugoslavia.

  From the outset it was clear that Lydia’s mother hoped that my father would marry her and, indeed, that she was confident he would. She did not believe that he would have brought her and her son to Australia merely to keep his word, and so it must have seemed to her highly probable that, because he was lonely and seeking a wife, he would settle for the mother instead of her daughter. She was, after all, only a few years older than my father who had just turned forty. According to the criteria that determine prospects in arranged marriages, she would have been a good catch. Still attractive in middle age, with considerable charm, she worked hard in the house and cooked and cleaned. My father said on more than one occasion that she was a good woman who would make a good wife, only not for him.

  She had no sense of his desperate passion for Lydia. Perhaps she believed him to be as insincere as her daughter and that he persisted in the strange romance with Lydia for reasons other than those he declared. My father unintentionally but naively encouraged her belief in her prospects when he allowed her to choose furniture suites for the bedrooms and living room, which stayed in the house until he died. I doubt that my father felt ambivalent, but his behaviour gave her cause to hope even though he told her many times that she had no grounds for it and should nurse no ambitions of marriage.

  And so it remained, more or less, for a few months. Though by no means completely well, my father had improved considerably. He worked hard, still at Lillie’s, for he had not built or bought a new workshop in Maryborough. He continued to see signs in many things, and sometimes interrogated people about what they had said or done. Occasionally he erupted in irrational behaviour, but on the whole he kept his imaginings sufficiently clear of his behaviour to lead something resembling a normal life.

  On the eve of the new year 1963, an old friend of my father’s came to Maryborough. To protect his identity, I shall call him ‘M’. My father was glad to see him because he had offended M during his illness and they had seen little of each other since. M arrived while I was out and had been celebrating with my father for a few hours by the time I returned. Hearing the conversation before I entered the room, I felt that everything was just as it had been years before. They were in fine spirits, talking as
they had in the past, with animated intensity, with pleasure and laughter. Lydia’s mother joined in. Homemade slivovitz, up to 90 per cent proof, flowed freely.

  M slept with me in a small room on the verandah. Around three in the morning I heard him get up to go to the lavatory and noticed that he was gone a long time. I thought he might be sick after so much to drink, but because I was only partly awake I fell asleep before he returned. The next morning I woke before him and went into the house to hear my father speaking on the telephone in an agitated voice. When I asked him what was the matter, he told me that he had phoned the hospital to see if a psychiatrist could come to the house; Lydia’s mother had gone mad. She was saying that M had come to her bed that night. She refused to get up until he left the house.

  Remembering the events of the previous night, I suspected she was not at all mad. When M came into the kitchen minutes after me, he told my incredulous father that Lydia’s mother’s story was essentially true. After he went to the lavatory he went to her room. It was pitch-black, with no streetlights, no moon and no other light to relieve the darkness. When he came into her bed she received him with evident pleasure.

  Only afterwards, when he spoke, did she realise who he was. In the darkness she had thought he was my father, and that her hopes had finally materialised. When she discovered that it was M who had made love to her, she threw him out of bed quietly, so as not to wake my father, reserving her hysteria for the morning.

  My father listened to M with mixed emotions that were written clearly across his face. He was amused, it was so evidently a terrific story. But, though he was amused by the plot, he wished the story had a different setting. He showed no anger towards M for he knew that M would not have dreamed of going to the disconsolate woman’s bed if my father had not persistently said that he had no interest whatsoever in her, or if he knew how firmly she would have been opposed to his advances. M believed she had given him some encouragement during the evening of drinking and conversation in the kitchen, and took her willingness as a further expression of it. After all, the truth—that she had mistaken him for my father—was so improbable that it would not have occurred to him to be the reason why she consented to his lovemaking.