The attitude he expressed to the lone goat was the same that he showed to many animals. When he saw one he was inclined to think there should be two and, if the two did not make three or more, he fretted over them. The long backyard in Maryborough was often home to sick or breeding animals or to their offspring: baby goats, rabbits, chickens, ducks, turkeys, and of course pups and kittens. To the delight of my children there was sometimes a sick animal, usually a baby goat, in the kitchen where it could warm itself by the stove.
His compassion extended undiminished to his bees. On an occasion when we were repairing my car at night, the bees flew to where we were working, attracted to the light. A dozen or so were crushed between our hands and the engine block. My father became increasingly distressed as the number of dead bees increased. I had at least half a dozen stings, and felt ill because of them, but his sorrow was directed at the bees.
On winter mornings he gathered the bees which had not entered the hive the previous night, to all appearances quite dead as they lay on the grass. He took them into the kitchen, lay them on their backs on the table and held an electric light bulb about fifteen centimetres above them, moving it continuously so that they would not be harmed by a concentration of heat. It was an entrancing and moving experience to see their legs twitch, so slightly at first that one wondered whether it had really happened, and then more surely. After a few minutes they turned themselves right way up, still unsteady on their feet. When they looked ready to fly we took them outside.
Jack did not move to Maryborough with us. My father knew that he could not let him roam free there: his destructive ways would soon see him shot. Rather than cage him my father left him at Frogmore, hoping that he would fly off with a passing flock of cockatoos, his wing having grown again. My father’s dogs assumed the place previously taken by Jack in his affections. They spent the day with him and, in the evenings, when Milka was not with him, they lay on the bed with her while she watched television.
My father fed them whatever he ate partly because he could see no reason why dogs should be denied a varied diet, but mostly because he believed that it was mean-spirited to deny them food merely because it was expensive or supposedly too good for dogs. He sometimes offended people who brought him continental cakes or sausages from Melbourne, because he always gave some to the dogs who he believed should share the treat. He took the dogs to the drive-in movies, convinced that they enjoyed them, and from behind it was indeed a strange sight to see the heads of two dogs who were sitting on the back seat apparently attentive to the screen.
My father’s behaviour to his animals struck some people as sentimental. Some said that he treated his dogs as though they were human beings. They were quite wrong, for his practice always expressed a wisely judged sense of the radical difference in kind between human beings and animals, even though he sometimes blurred that distinction in conversation. When his dogs died, he was heartbroken and cried. He told me that sometimes the pain in his chest lasted for weeks and tears would catch him without warning. Even so, he merely buried them in a hole in the backyard and would have thought it absurd to observe any of the rituals we think appropriate when human beings die. Sometimes, to explain his generous treatment of his dogs, he would say that if dogs go to heaven, and he met them there, he hoped that they would say that he treated them well. I always thought that to be a beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed.
Not all injured animals fared so well as his first goat. One day while visiting a farmer my father noticed a pig with a broken leg.
‘This pig, what will you do with him?’ he asked.
‘Probably shoot him and throw him on the tip,’ the farmer replied.
My father looked again at the pig and said, ‘There’s a lot of sausage in him.’
The farmer gave my father the pig, gratis. With some difficulty he managed to get it home, slaughtered it and indeed made sausage of it. Smoked and spicy, it tasted superb. I estimated that were you to buy it in Melbourne delicatessens, the lot would cost almost a thousand dollars. The next year he bought a pig at the market, again injured, for eighty dollars, and did the same with it. Such enterprise enabled him and Milka to live well on their meagre income.
When she was little, my younger daughter, Eva, was troubled by the fact that my father killed animals, even though she knew he killed them only to eat them. I asked her whether she knew of anyone, or had even read of anyone, who treated animals more kindly than her grandfather. She immediately replied that there was no one. In itself of course that was no argument, but argument was not needed to put an end to her unease. The authority of her grandfather’s example taught her that there was no serious moral gap between his kindness to animals and his preparedness sometimes to kill them. She learned through his example what it might mean to kill an animal.
My father’s sense of the difference between human beings and animals was not always conventional. Once, when I visited him, he told me how his goats had been killed, their innards torn out and their carcasses left. Some people attributed the savage killings to a wild mountain lion which rumour said had been seen in the area. Mountain lions are not natural to any part of Australia and most people gave as much credence to this as they did to tales of the Loch Ness monster.
My father put the savage killings down to human cruelty. He had waited some nights hidden behind a log, hoping to catch the killers. Around ten at night, he took his rifle and asked me whether I was coming with him. I knew my father and so I knew that nothing I could say would deter him from going. He would either go alone or go with me. I was taken back to the time when we went to Sydney, he intent on shooting Lydia’s husband. As I did then, I knew that because he had asked me it was morally impossible for me to refuse.
We sat behind a log at his property outside Carisbrook, on a crisp, moonless winter night, the sky black and opulent with stars. As we talked I wondered whether I could stop him if it came to a showdown, and whether the University of London would still employ me after I had been in a shoot-out on an Australian farm. Mercifully, no one came.
For a time after he stopped making garden settings my father kept the workshop, but made things only for locals—some garden settings, but mostly gates or verandah posts. Antiques and craftsmanship had become fashionable and I tried to convince him that there might be a market for beaten ironwork, but he had lost interest in the business world, and so stopped making things even for private sale. It was a pity, for the beaten ironwork of his youth in Germany, rather than the fashionable wroughtiron of the fifties, was the source of his deepest pride, and had he taken it up again he would have made things which were superbly crafted and of great beauty.
He and Milka lived on their pensions. For a time they were virtually self-sufficient, growing almost all their own vegetables, killing their meat, sometimes goats, mostly lambs, making their own jams and pickling conserves. He even grew his own tobacco from seeds brought from Yugoslavia and made cigars, but the tobacco needed so much pesticide to survive that smoking it made one sick. Like most Europeans of peasant stock he was a late convert to natural forms of pest control. Generations of them had suffered heartbreaking losses and therefore looked upon chemical pesticides as their saviour. For a long time many resisted natural pesticides with a ferocity that was fuelled by the pain of their past losses.
During this period, in the early and mid-eighties, my father urged me to try to find my adopted sisters.
He had done it many times since I was a teenager and he could not understand why I showed no interest in doing so. The truth is that I had no sense of extended family, not of my father’s family nor of my mother’s, until I met Maria, my mother’s sister, who had helped look after me when I was a baby. Through a series of accidents I arrived unannounced on Maria’s doorstep in Germany more than twenty years after she had last seen me. I was then twenty-seven years old. When she opened the door, I asked, ‘Frau Becker?’
She look puzzled for only a second or two. ‘Raimond! Was für eine Über
raschung!’ (What a surprise).
I fell in love with her straightaway, no doubt partly because she looked and sounded so like my mother. All day she said to herself, ‘Was für eine Uberraschung!’
This new-found sense of family, my love for Maria and her children Ulrike and Andrea, gradually awakened in me a desire to find Susan and Barbara. The adoption laws had changed, making it possible for me to seek them out. It proved to be easy, for they had been adopted by a couple who had lived all their married life in the same house in Melbourne. When the social worker rang the couple telling them that I was looking for my sisters, they reluctantly informed Barbara and Susan of the fact. Neither knew they had a brother and were astonished and confused to learn of it. Barbara lived in Melbourne and Susan in Wodonga three hundred kilometres to the north. Both were now married with children. To the joy of my father and Hora we were reunited, nervously but happily, in the mid-eighties.
My father believed that for brother and sister not to know of each other’s whereabouts, let alone existence, was so profoundly against the order of things that it constituted a metaphysical damage to their lives. When Barbara and Susan came with me to Maryborough, visited the graves of our mother and Mitru and sat in my father’s kitchen and talked, he felt the damage had been repaired. He believed that whatever might happen in the future, nothing could compromise the intrinsic good of our having found each other. As well as anyone he knew that truth could be painful, but he denied that it could be harmful, believing that its capacity to do damage was dependent entirely on the attitude one took to it. He could not understand how anyone could prefer to live in ignorance or illusion about anything that mattered to the meaning of their lives. Hora was also inclined to this belief, but less strongly than my father.
He and my father were comforted by the fact that Susan and Barbara were married with children, taking it as a sign that the girls had not been so damaged by their childhood as to be incapable of living an ordinary life. Hora noted how Susan looked like his grandmother. My father noted that both girls had the long noses bequeathed by my mother’s father to his family.
Although my father never admitted it, quitting his ironwork was not good for him. He had worked hard all his life and grew up in a culture which disposed him to see work in the light of the old biblical curse, a necessity to whose yoke one would consent only if one could not free oneself of it. He was puzzled by people who worked when they did not need to, suspecting their motives to be either greed or the need for status. This was despite the fact that he enjoyed his ironwork and found such fulfilment in it, and also despite the fact that he and Hora were inclined to believe that depth and real contentment were to be found only in a life governed by necessity. Wisdom, they believed, lay in consent to that necessity. Superficiality and restlessness were in store for those who fled it.
But my father did not integrate this wisdom into his life. After he sold his workshop he was incapable of not working and incapable of fully understanding that fact. So he created necessities for himself: the animals which he had to feed and the garden which he had to tend. But apart from the periods of drought when he cut grass, working as hard as few men could, his animals and garden did not give him enough to do under the mantle of necessity, and he began to decline.
Without real work he again became vulnerable to depression and tended to brood on his moral disappointment with the world. He longed for visitors who seldom came, the distance from Melbourne being too great. He was especially glad to see Hora, but Hora now suffered terribly from arthritis and found it difficult to drive. Even when he came with me, he was reluctant to do so in winter, for Maryborough was colder than Melbourne and the unheated bedroom was painful for him. A bitterness, which I had never seen in him before, entered my father’s life. The pain of it showed in his eyes.
His sorrow was deepened by the fact that I lived in England. He often said that it did not matter, since I was with him every day in his heart. He reasoned that because I was born of European parents I would discover my European roots when I went to England and he predicted that I would not return, even though I went intending to stay only for as long as it took to do a PhD. At the airport he reminded me that he had left Yugoslavia never to return. As I left he sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
Nonetheless I knew that he wished for me to return. He could not understand that I wanted to stay there for my work, partly because he did not understand my commitment to the life of the mind. It troubled him because he saw in it a sign of the restlessness that he feared would be a legacy of my childhood. His anxiety over this, rather than the more common desire of parents to want material benefits for their children, made him wish that I could live an uncomplicated life in Melbourne working as a solicitor or doctor, resting well on weekends and visiting him at least once a month. He took some pride in my successes, but his attitude to them is conveyed in what he said when he saw a doll’s house I had made for my children. It had a carved stairway and carved mantelpieces, corniced ceilings, panelled doors, electric lights and power points. After inspecting it he expressed his admiration, adding, ‘I see that you have some brains after all.’
Milka felt their growing isolation as much as my father, and both complained of it. My father was partly responsible for it because he sometimes alienated potential visitors by his reprimands when they did not come after they had expressed an intention to do so. He reprimanded them because his moral outlook could not tolerate a significant distinction between a promise and the declaration of an intention.
If you said that you would come on this or that day, even though the context would have made it clear to anyone else that this was no promise, merely the declaration of your intention, he would hold you to it as though you had promised, and would sometimes call you a liar if you did not come. This was not mere cantankerousness but, as with his inability to understand self-deception, a conceptual matter. His failure to distinguish statements of intentions from promises was the expression of a perspective that treated the difference as of no moral significance.
Because the verbal expression of an intention may often be the same as the verbal expression of a promise, sometimes only context or tone enables people to distinguish one from the other. My father’s profound regard for the spoken word was of a kind that sometimes made him literal-minded and tone-deaf to context. If you defended yourself against the accusation that you had broken your word, he became impatient, treating the defence as an expression of bad faith, a failure of character, a refusal to be true to the words you had spoken. If you said that you hoped to come, or that you might come, that was fine. If you said that you would come, he would hold you to it under pain of lack of integrity, of a failure to have your character integrated by a commitment to your words. He seemed to believe that only a self in that way integrated had risen to the humanising potential of speech. I think that is why he ran together, so literally, the words one spoke and the giving of one’s word.
His decline was hastened by heart disease, which accelerated rapidly soon after he first developed the symptoms of angina. Within a couple of years he was barely able to walk. At first he said that he would refuse all operations because, as he put it, he would not consent to be ‘cut up’. He meant that he would not prolong his life with many operations because it was unnatural and undignified to flee death when nature had intended it for you, an indignity compounded by going to your grave mutilated by operations whose scars testified to your vain desire to live beyond your appointed time. His attitude was shaped by the fate of cancer patients.
When he realised that the bypass he needed would be a once-only operation, he reluctantly agreed to it. My difficulty in persuading him was increased by his doctor who convinced him that he was not in urgent need of an operation. When my father arrived at St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne for his angiogram, the doctor who tested him was shocked that his condition had been allowed to deteriorate so far.
I was in London at the time of his operation—a triple bypass. My wi
fe, Yael, came every day to visit him. Immediately after the operation, when he was in the recovery room, she became anxious because he was unconscious for a long time. She alerted an attendant who agreed there was cause for concern and suggested that my father may have suffered a stroke. He urged her to call his name. Again and again she called, ‘Romulus’, but he did not respond. Hours after she had gone, he emerged from deep unconsciousness. The operation was a success, but he had suffered a stroke during the angiogram and another during the operation, which left him paralysed along one side and unable to remember anything, not even why he was in hospital.
Later Yael came each evening to massage him, so that he might regain control of his arms and legs, to rub his back with methylated spirits so that he would not get sores, and to comfort and encourage him. She was then teaching five days a week, working a stall at the Victoria Market at weekends and looking after Dahlia and Michelle, her two small children whom she often took with her to the hospital. My father was grateful and also glad of visitors, but Yael noticed how he hoped every visitor was Milka, his disappointment when she did not come and how his eyes lit up when she did. He kissed her on the lips like a young man would. Most of the time Milka stayed in Maryborough because the animals needed looking after. My father would not countenance their neglect for his sake, but it became evident how profound his need of Milka was.
He recovered quite quickly from his strokes, but never fully regained the control of his left hand. With great difficulty he gave up smoking, but he drew the line at continental sausages or smoked bacon which he enjoyed until his death. A year after the bypass, he had another angiogram. Neither his specialist nor his local doctor told those who were to perform it that he had suffered a stroke during the previous one. He had another stroke and lost most of the sight in his left eye. No apologies came from the doctors. Working in the garden was all that he was now capable of because he could not weld or even hold middle-sized tools. Nor could he drive. He often looked at his hands and wondered what had become of him.
Romulus, My Father Page 13