Romulus, My Father

by Gaita, Raimond

  Lydia’s mother accused my father of putting M up to it and said that she would not rise from her bed until M left the house. The requirements of hospitality were profoundly important to my father and he was fully aware of what it meant for him to ask a friend to leave his house, even in these circumstances. On the other hand, he knew Lydia’s mother had a case and was, anyway, troubled by what to do if she made good her threat not to get out of bed. In the event M spared him the decision and went without being asked.

  She left too a month or so later to join her son who had gone to Sydney in pursuit of work more suited to his intellectual gifts. She parted on speaking terms with my father and indeed, later that year, I stayed with her for a few days when I went to Sydney, to get a driver’s licence a year earlier than the law in Victoria allowed. But that was the last we heard of her or her daughter.

  By this time—I was almost sixteen—my relationship with my father had changed because I had asserted my independence. It occasioned a fierce but short-lived quarrel between us. He believed strongly that if you started something then you should finish it. He took this attitude when I told him that I intended to leave boarding school in Ballarat. It was early in the school year and I had been threatened with expulsion. Hora had often mentioned Bertrand Russell to me with admiration, so when in my second last year of secondary schooling I decided I would be a schoolteacher, I read Russell’s book on education. I was much impressed with his views, including his views on sex education, and expressed my enthusiasm for them to my classmates. The headmaster got to hear of this and threatened me with expulsion on the grounds that I was corrupting them.

  A week or so later the headmaster noticed that I was wearing fashionably pointed-toed shoes. They were banned in the school, but my only other pair was being mended. He told me to take them off immediately. We were in the dining room at lunchtime, so I assumed he meant that I could put them on again when I had finished eating. It was raining and cold outside. As I was running to class after lunch, a window flew open and the headmaster called out, ‘I told you to take your shoes off.’

  ‘But, Sir, it’s raining. I’ll catch a cold,’ I protested, incredulous at the need for me to say this.

  ‘Never mind. If you won’t do as you’re told, you can pack your bags this evening,’ he answered.

  For the remainder of the day I went about in wet socks, allowed to put my shoes on only in time for evening prayers.

  That night I rang my father. I used the telephone in a dormitory-house that was supervised by a fine teacher, Brother Bernard Cummins, whom I admired for his ability to convey how exciting the life of the mind could be. I asked my father to collect me the next morning and told him that I didn’t want to stay another day in the school. He implored me to say for the duration of the year, pleading so anxiously that I agreed to consider it. I must have been shouting hysterically, for when I stepped outside the booth, Brother Cummins called me to his room. There he comforted me and urged me to heed my father’s pleas.

  I did so and stayed the year by which time my father had completely forgotten the incident. He was therefore shocked when I told him that I had done as he asked, and that I now intended to go to school in Melbourne. Unknown to him, I had been accepted into Melbourne High School, then one of the finest schools in the state, thanks to the intervention of a kind woman, Mrs Creath Caldwell. A speech teacher in Melbourne, she had heard me at a public-speaking competition. She wrote congratulating me and welcomed me to her home if I were visiting Melbourne. I replied telling her I intended to study in Melbourne the following year and asked which schools she recommended. She had a son at Melbourne High School and arranged an interview. I sat the entrance exam and was accepted.

  My father refused to allow me to go. He said that I had started at St Patrick’s and so should finish, that I would go to ruin, a boy of sixteen alone in Melbourne, living in boarding houses. I told him that I wasn’t seeking his permission, that I intended to go, and that the only question was whether he would support me. We fought angrily, but I was determined and when finally he realised this and that he could not stop me, he agreed to pay my board and whatever else I needed. For years, however, he insisted I had made the wrong decision, not because any of his predictions came true, but only because I had not finished what I had started. Some years later when I changed from psychology to philosophy at university, he took the same attitude. He thought it a weakness in me.

  In Melbourne, I lived for a time in a series of rooming houses, but eventually took a room at the house where Hora was boarding. It was owned by the same people from whom he had rented in Prahran—friends of his and my father’s. Hora had a room and a small kitchen in which we often sat talking. He had a routine each evening, of making a cup of weak black tea, cutting a small slice of often dry bread, and two or three centimetres of salami. He cut the bread and sausage into pieces no bigger than a fingernail and slowly ate them while sipping his tea. The frugality and ritual would have impressed Mahatma Gandhi.

  It was during this period, which lasted until halfway into my first year at university, that I had my only adult quarrel with Hora. At university I became attracted to radical left-wing politics. When I had talked about this with him, I noticed he was reticent and disapproving. I had a guitar and a book of protest songs. One evening I sang a song about strike-breakers with these words: ‘The scabs crawl in, the scabs crawl out, the scabs crawl under and all about.’

  Hora lost his temper. ‘Don’t you know that most unions are infiltrated by communists? Don’t you know how ruthless they are? Don’t you know what butchers they have been? Is this what a university education does for you?’

  For more than a month he did not speak to me, though I often went to his kitchen hoping that he would.

  At first I thought that Hora’s anger had turned cold, that he had simply turned his back on me, and I was very hurt. I was mistaken. He knew that I knew how many millions had perished under communism, for he had often told me. Given that I knew, how could I not care? But how could I claim to care if I treated it all so lightly? If I was now such a morally shallow person, what could he say to me? How could he speak to me of anything that mattered?

  These questions cut into his heart, for he loved me. For him the pleasure of talking even about trivial matters depended on his knowing that the person with whom he was speaking was one whose responses to other topics could be trusted to be serious and decent. ‘That was essential to his joy in conversation. Hora did not refuse to speak to me out of anger or indignation. He simply couldn’t speak. I became, quite literally, someone to whom he had nothing to say. This happened more than once in his life with other people. When he spoke to me again he did not mention the incident and, when I moved elsewhere, we saw each other often.

  My father told the story that one evening he prayed to God to give him a good wife if he was deserving of one. A few days later he went to Melbourne and asked friends if they knew of a woman who wanted to marry. It happened that they had heard of a Yugoslav divorcee who worked in a factory in Yarraville. A meeting was arranged and that is how he first met Milka.

  She was twenty-nine and, as he put it, ‘just right, not too tall, not too short, not too fat, not too thin, not too dark, not too light’. In fact, she was very attractive, in appearance and in personality. She told him that she couldn’t cook, to which he replied that it didn’t matter provided she did it and the washing. To his embarrassment he realised at their first meeting that he had virtually no money with him, so he borrowed from her to take her to dinner. They met again in Melbourne a few weeks later. She had her hair permed and coloured and, although he told her it made her ‘look like a monkey’, it did not stop her from coming to live in Maryborough, in September 1963 on the night before Tom Lillie’s funeral.

  They agreed to live together for a trial period. It was not easy for Milka. At close quarters my father was still unmistakably ill. This might excuse his behaviour, but it did not make living with him any easier. For one
thing, the need to make allowances often frustrated the natural development and expression of her anger. For another, she found the acknowledgment that she was living with someone who was mentally ill more disturbing, even frightening, than the thought that she had married someone of bad or unpredictable character.

  They often fought, sometimes vigorously and physically, although Milka seemed in these stoushes to give as good as she got. I sometimes separated them, declaring in the fatuous tone of a teenager who believed himself to be sophisticated that they should show more maturity’. The house shook with their battles, which almost always ended with Milka threatening to leave. My father said that she was free to go, but only in the morning, after they had slept the night together. I don’t think that she ever went.

  I am sure that is because she recognised him to be a good and unusual man. Throughout their marriage she was financially independent, always taking half of what they earned together. She went wherever she wanted by herself, knowing that infidelity would lead to divorce. Although he had insisted that she cook, he really meant unless he was not inclined to, which he often was. The division he knew from his childhood, between women’s and men’s work, played little role in his life. He sewed, cooked and baked, teaching Milka how to make strudel with their own pastry (thin as a cigarette paper), doughnuts and other things. His respect for her independence was unusual in husbands of his vintage from their part of Europe and Milka knew it. They married six months after she first came to Maryborough.

  Soon afterwards they began to build a workshop on land my father had bought on the industrial side of Maryborough. When Tom Lillie died, his daughter asked my father to leave the blacksmith shop because she intended to lease the farm. Milka and he built the workshop together, digging the foundations, laying the cement, erecting the building. He made the steel frame, the supporting stanchions and the large steel supports for the roof which he put in place with only Milka to help him. When it was built Milka worked with him, grinding the welding residues and helping him with the painting by bringing and taking away garden settings. She did this for many hundreds of garden settings over the years.

  She was constantly with him, usually working until evening, and then she often stayed with him in the workshop until 10 or 11 p.m., preferring to be there than home alone. He made an iron stove so that she would be warm in winter, especially in the evenings, and was proud of the fact that it warmed the entire large workshop within half an hour, glowing red hot. When the garden settings were finished he hired a semitrailer to take them to Melbourne where he painted them because he did not want any to arrive with chipped paintwork. He often stayed in a caravan park and sometimes with his uncle. Every evening he telephoned Milka who was impatient for his call and for his return.

  This was the uncle from whom he fled when he was thirteen. During the fifties, my father sent him expensive medicines which kept him alive and later brought him and his son to Australia. He received little thanks for it, not from his uncle who threw him out of his house in Melbourne, nor from many others whom he helped bring to Australia and in other ways.

  Compassion went unusually deep in my father. It showed itself all his life in the help he gave those in need and in the pain he visibly felt for their pain. He was literally incapable of not helping someone genuinely in need if he had the means to do so. Whenever he made money, through his business or later when he sold the land and the workshop, he looked to see who needed some. He could no more have money without giving some to others who needed it than he could eat steak and not give some to his dogs.

  He was like that from the time he was a boy. Over the years he sent thousands of dollars to relatives in Yugoslavia. When he sold his workshop he immediately offered Hora six thousand dollars to pay off a bank debt. Hora refused the offer. My father persisted. Why should he have money sitting in the bank when Hora was in debt and paying interest? Always Hora refused, but he was joyful to know that he had such a friend.

  More often than not my father’s generosity was abused, and although it pained him it did not diminish his impulse to give. Once he paid the airfares for an entire family: husband, wife and three children. In those days—the mid-sixties—this cost almost as much as a modest house such as his in Maryborough. The husband had assured my father that he would repay him as soon as he was able, but when he arrived, and was actually living with his family in my father’s house, he pointed out that there existed no written agreement concerning repayments. Notwithstanding this, my father allowed him to stay, but his patience broke when, a month or so into their stay, he produced a three-quarters-full bottle of slivovitz as a present for my father. Incredulous that the man could not even give him a full bottle and unable to bear this added insult to his substantial injury, my father asked him to speed up his search for a house.

  He left, but lived for some years in Maryborough where he worked hard, bought a house and a new car yet offered my father not a cent in repayment. Instead, he came to the house to show off his new car, condescending to my father because he still drove an old Holden. My father’s and Milka’s relatives in Yugoslavia were no better. They often wrote pleading for money, often pretending to be ill, but when he and Milka went to visit them they discovered that the money they had sent for medicine and other necessities had contributed to the renovation of houses that were larger and better furnished than his. On one occasion when Milka was there, one of them actually asked for, and was given, the coat from her back.

  Extreme though these examples are, they are true to the outlook of most of my father’s Yugoslav relatives. They were somewhat redeemed by the fact that they worked so hard, often at two jobs, laying the bricks for their own houses or working as labourers to the bricklayers. This was before it became fashionable—mostly for a later generation of people living in Australia—to make money defrauding the social services, feigning work injuries, wearing neck braces and walking on crutches, but abandoning them when they moved heavy furniture in the privacy of their homes. Some of his relatives were also overtaken by religion, converting from their Orthodox faith to become evangelical Baptists and urging my father to do the same. There was an epidemic of such conversions.

  My father found these conversions amusing and irritating: amusing at a distance, irritating when his relatives came to his house and sang hymns instead of conversing. They had so little understanding of my father, and so little understanding of themselves, that they did not realise that he would never be converted by people whom he regarded as hypocrites. His sense of religion and their desire for wealth and prestige were radically incompatible. He believed that those who were genuinely religious felt no need to distinguish themselves from others in such ways.

  Not that there was a chance of anyone converting him. He looked with suspicion on those who changed their religion, whatever it was and for whatever reason. He prayed each day to a God he believed would listen to all prayers that came from a pure heart. He thought it absurd to believe that God would listen only to the prayers of those who belonged to particular institutions, as absurd as believing that He would listen to prayers in only one language.

  My father’s religion, as it was most deeply lived by him, was quite separate from the superstitions that tormented him during his illness and which later became a settled part of his outlook. If his superstitions had mattered to him religiously, if they had seriously informed the spiritual dimensions of his life, then he would have set them polemically against the speculative beliefs of other religions. But he always regarded such beliefs as inessential to what he understood as genuine religiosity. He had no interest in doctrine. At the centre of his religious sensibility was the idea of a pure heart responsive to those in need. Of itself, that idea did not make him religious. What made him religious was the connection of that idea with prayer rather than with his spiritualist beliefs.

  His spiritualism—as distinct from his profound spirituality—was superficial and unreligious, a belief in spirits floating free of the body, in sleep and
after death, travelling to other planets. He talked often about this, but apart from when he was ill and alarmed by his beliefs in the malign intentions of these spirits, he always propounded his views in the mood of what he called ‘just talking’—speculation—and they had no connection with his moral conduct.

  His belief in an afterlife was unconnected with his sense of good and evil, reward and punishment or any conception of the last judgment. But when he talked seriously about religion, as for example when he begged me to pray, dismayed that I could not, I did not feel that he was urging me to adopt a supernatural means to a natural or even a supernatural end. Rather, his sense of our deep need of prayer was the expression of his belief that only a life of prayer could enable one to consent to great and protracted misfortune and for that consent to go sufficiently deep to save one from despair, I believe that is why the only time that his spiritualism connected with anything deep in his life was when it intersected with his fatalism. The God he prayed to was the God whom he encountered in the Bible stories of his childhood which came mostly from the Old Testament—the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Job.

  Despite judging most of his relatives to be crooks and hypocrites, untruthful in their words and deeds, greedy in their pursuits while preaching the puritanical gospel of the Baptists, he enjoyed their company when they could keep off talking about religion. He longed for European society, saying that he felt like ‘a prisoner’ in Australia. He meant that, although he had good neighbours, in Maryborough he had almost no one with whom he could enjoy the generous and open forms of conviviality that characterised European hospitality as he knew it. He complained that one could not just drop in on Australians and talk freely for hours; one had, as he put it, always to ‘make an appointment’. Whereas if you went into a European home, you would generally be offered food and talk, both in generous quantities. He especially missed Hora, but Hora had married in the mid-sixties and was preoccupied with domestic life and especially with his two young children, Irena and Raymond.