Romulus, My Father

by Gaita, Raimond

  ‘Can you believe how I used to be?’ he asked me. ‘I’m good for nothing. Just for the rubbish heap.’

  On a Monday morning in May 1996 my father complained to Milka of pain in his stomach which became severe during the course of the afternoon. He went to the doctor who told him he had the flu. During the night the pain had become unbearable. On Tuesday morning it was so severe that he could not write a greeting in a birthday card that Milka was writing for me, even though it was for my fiftieth birthday. That afternoon she rang the doctor, very worried, asking whether mere flu could cause such terrible pain. She was assured it could.

  The next day, Wednesday, his condition even worse, she took my father to the clinic. His doctor was away, so she went to another, who gruffly told him to take off his trousers and to climb onto the examining bed. Milka protested at this brutish treatment, pointing out that my father’s pain was so severe that he could barely stand. She refused to accept any suggestion that my father needed anything less than hospitalisation. That afternoon he was taken by ambulance to the hospital in Ballarat.

  Milka phoned me that Wednesday night around ten. I was preparing to leave for Tasmania where I was to give some lectures, to be joined by Yael at the weekend. Because my father knew that we were in need of a holiday, he told Milka to say nothing to me in case I should cancel my trip. Fortunately she finally disregarded this instruction. I phoned the Ballarat hospital to be told that the doctors had not settled on a diagnosis. An hour later they conducted an exploratory operation and telephoned me just after midnight to inform me of the result. My father had a dead gut, caused by a clot in the artery supplying his stomach. They thought it unlikely that he would live for more than twenty-four hours.

  I decided not to phone Milka because I hoped that she was asleep. I knew she would need all her strength over the coming days. I phoned Hora, told him what the doctors had told me, and asked if he wanted to come with me to Ballarat, first thing in the morning. Of course he did. Milka phoned an hour later and I told her the news.

  In the morning, Hora and I drove first to Maryborough to collect Milka and then on to Ballarat. The doctors in intensive care had told my father what was wrong with him and that there was no hope. He was barely conscious, partly because of the anaesthetic, and partly because his entire system was poisoned because his gut no longer functioned. He made a whimpering sound at the expulsion of each breath. I thought he was frightened because he knew that he was dying, but was unable to muster sufficient consciousness even to try to come to terms with the fact. Hora thought that he was probably assailed by terrible imagery, a consequence of his poisoned system and his incapacity to regain full consciousness.

  He remained in that state throughout the day, able sometimes to hear, but seldom to respond with more than one word.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ I asked him many times.

  ‘No,’ he replied each time.

  The surgeon advised that my father would not be discomfited if he did not have the oxygen mask, so we removed it because it covered much of his face, obscuring what little expressiveness remained to him. In these last hours, I wanted him to be as fully present to us as was possible, Milka and Hora went home to Maryborough around six. As he left, Hora called, ‘Gaita.’ There was no response. Again he called, ‘Gaita,’ and then, ‘Goodbye.’ His voice broke and his entire body heaved as he said goodbye. I thought he would collapse into uncontrolled tears. My father did not respond.

  Soon after Hora and Milka left Yael came with my daughters Katie and Eva. From the beginning my father responded more to the children than he had to anyone that day. They told him that they loved him and he replied that he loved them too. Blessed by an inspiration, Katie asked him whether he remembered a song he sang to her when she was little, sitting on his knee waiting for the dinner to cook. ‘Oopa doopa, doopa, macaroni soupa.’ She and Eva began to sing it, and to our amazement and joy he joined them, wanting even to go a second chorus. He then fell into silence, never to speak again.

  Yael and the girls went to a motel while I stayed at the hospital. At ten o’clock nurses came to turn my father onto his other side. As they began to do it, he moaned in obvious pain. I pleaded with them to leave him be. They said that hospital regulations required them to turn him to prevent bed sores. I told them that he wouldn’t live long enough for that, and pointed out the irony of the fact that the only time he showed pain was when they tried to ensure that he would not suffer it. Torn between the regulations and good sense, they allowed good sense to prevail.

  I sat down to wait with him for his death. The nurses brought me a comfortable chair, one that would open into a bed, in case I slept the night. I reflected that just as I had been with him alone at Frogmore during the time of his terrible affliction, so I was now again alone with him in his mortal agony. And, as in my childhood, I spoke to him in German. I told him many times, ‘Ich liebe dich, mein Vater.’ At first he opened his eyes each time I said it, but after a time he made no response.

  My father died just past midnight, as they had predicted twenty-four hours before. I kissed him and sat with him for another half-hour before calling the nurses. I phoned Milka and told her that my father and her husband was dead. Then I went to my wife and my children who were waiting at the motel.

  In the morning Yael, the girls and I went to Maryborough to be with Milka and also to arrange the funeral. As with Mitru and my mother, it was entrusted to Phelan’s, and as with Mitru and my mother, it was arranged that my father would lie in an open coffin for his mourners to see him for the last time. It was a European custom and I knew that my father’s relatives expected it, but remembering Mitru’s funeral I forbade photographs.

  I asked the funeral director whether the local paper, the Maryborough Advertiser, accepted obituaries. He phoned to check. The editor was out, apparently chasing a mountain lion which he believed to have killed cattle and sheep, tearing out their innards and leaving the carcass. I remembered the night my father and I sat behind a log in Carisbrook and could barely hold back my tears.

  The funeral was on Monday, a day before my fiftieth birthday. I asked a friend, Peter Steele, who is also a priest, if he would conduct the service and bury my father. He agreed. Over the years he had heard me speak of my father, and on the night before the funeral we dined in Carlton and I told him, in summary, what I have written in this book. The next morning we drove through Maldon to Baringhup and on to where Frogmore had been, before it was burned down some years before in a grass fire. The bluestone dairy was still standing, but only some bricks, the concrete walls of the verandah, and a few twisted sheets of iron testified to the fact that a house had once stood next to it. At St Augustine’s Church, Peter gave a fine service, as I knew he would.

  I had asked Hora if he wanted to say a few words, but he felt unable to. There was no one else who could do it, so I gave the eulogy myself. I spoke of my father’s life, his values, his friendship with Hora and marriage to Milka, but I said almost nothing about my mother, nothing about Mitru, or Lydia, and I referred only elliptically to his mental breakdown. I hoped that what I left out would not compromise the truth of what I said. I concluded with these words:

  We sometimes express our most severe judgment of other people by saying that we will never again speak to them. I never heard my father say that nor can I imagine him saying it. That, perhaps more than anything else, testifies to his unqualified sense of common humanity with everyone he met. His severe judgment often caused pain, but the simple honesty of its expression, together with his unhesitating acceptance of those whom he judged so severely, convinces me that he never intentionally caused suffering to anyone. He was truly a man who would rather suffer evil than do it.

  When I came out of the church I saw an elderly man, standing apart, leaning on a walking stick, obviously an Australian, looking like an archetype of the men from my childhood whose character I remembered with admiration and fondness in my eulogy. I did not recognise him. When I went towards him I saw
that his eyes were filled with tears. It was Neil Mikkelsen, the man who had been kind to my mother, and who had fallen from the haystack when my father worked for him. ‘Every word you spoke was true,’ he said. ‘Your father saved my life.’

  His presence and his words moved me. I thought again of Frogmore and my life there with my father. I remembered my mother laughing as she talked with Mikkelsen at the chicken-wire gate.

  My father was buried in the Maryborough cemetery, close to my mother.