The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

As I continue looking around, the coldness remains and spreads through me as if I had swallowed ice.

  Under the bench, in the far left corner, is a large brown wooden trunk, its convex lid and sides reinforced with steel bands. My father built it in the camp in Lebenstedt. When we travelled to Australia many of our worldly possessions were packed into that trunk. There’s also a smaller green trunk that my father built upon arrival in Australia. Inside, the timber is clean and yellow, fresh, like the wood had been sawn recently. On top is a steel bassinette, also brought from Germany. It was used to bathe me in the camps, as my mother was moved around with me. Next to these is my father’s first lawnmower, a yellow Pope model, still in fair working condition, with its grass catcher beginning to rust.

  Brooms stand upside down between the door and the roller shutter, millet brooms and hair brooms of all sizes, a pink cobweb duster. Opposite them, an old black-and-white Pye TV set that once belonged to me. In front of it lies the whipper-snipper that my father asked me to buy so that cutting weeds would be easier when he grew old; then he hardly used it.

  The raphis palms are usually located between all this paraphernalia, in the coolest part of the garage, next to a small white stepladder that my father built. Meticulously measured, sawn, drilled, nailed, painted, it stands as a testament to a craftsman’s art.

  Other objects catch my eye and each of them is connected to a special memory, like the blue vinyl stroller that I used to wheel my children in to Rose Park, Sefton, when we lived in Chester Hill. I would push it up McClelland Street, across Hector, turn left and down Batt Street, across Rose and turn right, down a laneway, into the park. Hours were spent on the merry-go-round, the swings, the slippery dip, happy, fulfilling hours, thinking about the future.

  Opposite the stroller, standing upright, is my mother’s red shopping trolley. She would travel to Auburn or Bankstown or the local shopping centre for her purchases, fill the trolley to the brim and return home eagerly because she was coming back to her family to cook — something that gave her pleasure until the end of her life.

  Between the stroller and brown trunk is my father’s wheelbarrow, the kind I have never seen anywhere else, with its iron wheel and iron spokes, weighing a metaphorical “ton” and so strong it will outlive me. It is without rust. Clean. My father gave me rides in it when I was a little boy, up and down the rows of potato plants … And for a moment I see myself doing the same with my children, piling them in one at a time, playing “doubles”, around and around the backyard that is now grassed over. Bobby the dog is chasing us, the children are laughing, holding on to the sides. I’m trying to keep balance so that we don’t topple over. Finally I have to stop, tired and sweating. The dog’s tail is wagging madly, his tongue hanging out. My parents are on the back steps of the house, watching, shading their eyes from the afternoon sun.

  The wheelbarrow is filled with small pieces of rolled-up carpet, tied together with twine in my father’s inimitable fashion of securing things. He believed in the worth of twine and string. If it was strong, it was reliable, and you also needed to know how to tie it correctly. Beneath the rolls of carpet is a cardboard box with old Polish newspapers, yellowed with age, that my father refused to throw out. I know if I lift up the box, cockroaches and silverfish will scatter in all directions.

  The new Masport lawnmower stands on a small platform my father built to keep it off floor level, just in case the garage flooded — as it did several times in the fifties and sixties when Duck Creek overflowed and water ran through our yard. It was only in the seventies, when Bankstown Council began a gradual but systematic widening of the creek, with a network of drains and canals further back towards Birrong, that the problem of flooding in Mary Street was alleviated. In the nineties, the street was finally kerbed and guttered.

  On the floor beside the lawnmower is my father’s edger that was bought for him. Trimming the edges of the lawns by hand had become too difficult because of the onset of a mild form of Parkinson’s disease. His left hand would shake, sometimes more than at other times; it could never be really predicted. At first he was keen to use the edger, and tried valiantly, but by now he was into his eighties and starting it became a problem, or holding it steady to get the edges straight while the motor was running. Finally, in frustration, he gave up using it and reverted to the “shearing clippers” he’d used previously, holding his left hand at the wrist with his right, while he laboriously clipped and struggled with his left hand. Eventually, Mum and I talked him into abandoning the lawns altogether. Andrew became the “lawnmowing man”, using the Masport mower, whipper-snipper and edger while my father supervised — walking alongside Andrew and pointing out patches of lawn he might have missed or standing in the background, watching.

  Above me, between two rafters and laid on its side, is my Speedwell bicycle, in purple, green and white, its chrome rusted and peeling. My parents bought it for me from Bennet & Wood in the city, after the previous bicycle I’d owned was stolen from outside Chester Hill library. It was during my last year at high school and I’d ridden from Regents Park to return some history books. I parked the bike outside the main doors, turned my back for two or three minutes, came out and discovered my bike was stolen. I’d worked in school holidays, bred budgies and sold them to make money so I could buy that bike, as well as the accessories — headlamp, saddlebags, chain gears, reflectors, speedometer. A hard lesson in the security of property, and one I’ve never forgotten.

  Outside in the garden it is sunny. The Anzac Day marchers had fine weather after all; now they will be celebrating in hotels, clubs, private homes, in the streets — saluting the flag, drinking toasts, getting drunk, yarning, remembering …

  Snow Is Falling

  Snow is falling gently, softly, so fine and powdery it is like a mist.

  This is my first memory of Germany.

  Is this where I began?

  No, it can’t be because I have another memory, deeper and darker than all the nights of my life put together. I never used to talk about this memory, at least not for decades; it wasn’t because I was afraid, but because I thought that nobody would believe me, that people would laugh and call me stupid.

  The snow is falling against a windowpane.

  Is it tapping?

  I am three years old.

  My nose is pressed against the cold glass and a naked light globe brightens the room.

  This will be our last Christmas in Lebenstedt, Germany, in the Displaced Persons’ camp where we have been quartered. From here we will make our way, via Austria and Italy, across the seas to Australia.

  I am kneeling on a chair and looking at the drifting snow. Mounds of it are growing.

  Directly beneath the window is a wire enclosure with a low wooden structure, like a dog’s kennel, subdivided and lined with straw. That is where my father keeps rabbits. They are not being kept as pets; I am not allowed to play with them. These rabbits are kept for meat. They are bred, fattened and killed. Food in the camp comes from rations and food queues in the mess hall. There are people of all nationalities who depend on what is given out by the authorities, so many that often there isn’t enough food to go around and satisfy everyone. People are forced to resort to other means to supplement their diet, their food supplies. Not only can we eat the rabbits, but we can sell the meat or trade it.

  The snow is coupled with another beautiful element, but more dazzling, more transparent.

  Light.

  The word we associate with earliest childhood, even infancy, the word that enters our vocabulary as soon as we have some inkling about life itself. It blinds us when we are born. We associate it with the sun, fire, candles. We reach for it while still in our mothers’ arms, turn towards it or from it when we first wake. It becomes synonymous with warmth, with illuminating the darkness. In the Bible it’s an early part of Creation. “And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.”

  The snow falls from a blue sky so pale it resembles the frail shell
of a bird’s egg.

  The snow falls from this clean sky and passes through light that radiates it even more; it turns the snow into a milky drift and a transparent sheet at the same time, but I can’t see or touch the wind that blows the snow, just as I know it’s impossible to touch the light.

  My mother takes me by the hand and is going to bathe and dress me for the Christmas party being held in the camp’s hall. We are having Christmas in Germany, among people like ourselves, while waiting for news of our application to emigrate to Australia.

  Like us, they are living in hope.

  Poles, Russians, Germans, Ukrainians, Hungarians … Balts, Slavs, Gentiles, Jews. Single people and married people, children and babies, all destined for a New World, north or south of the Equator.

  My nose, chin and mouth have left impressions on the glass, but my breath now clouds them. I wave goodbye to the rabbits and, with my mother’s help, get off the chair. The time for watching the snow fall is over, but that other memory, my deepest secret, rises in my mind and then it’s gone, like a dream that fades quickly. But it will return.

  My long socks are woollen, thick and prickly, though they’re not even socks in the strict sense of the word because my mother has knitted long johns. It doesn’t take long to get used to the wool’s prickliness, and the socks are warm. Singlet, white shirt, underpants, a blue velvet suit and short black leather boots complete my attire. My mother adds a silver pin to the lapel of the jacket, a bird in flight, sleek as an arrow. In every formal photograph I have of myself from Germany, I am wearing that pin, the bird in flight, like a talisman.

  Two photographs in one of our family albums tell the story of that night.

  Who took the photographs?

  Another “Displaced Person”?

  An official photographer? I doubt it.

  Who in the camp was wealthy enough to own a camera and how did my family end up with the photographs?

  In one photograph there are four children and seven adults, four women and three men. Two of these are my parents. I am one of the children. There are two other boys about my age. The fourth child is also young but it’s hard to tell whether it’s a girl or boy. Everyone is sitting at a long, rectangular table and has been positioned to face the camera. Food and drinks are laid out. The table cloth is white and appears to have been starched. I am sitting on my mother’s lap, looking up at the ceiling. Had something caught my eye? The end of my collar is turned up, like an origami bird’s wing. The other children stare straight ahead. One is smiling. Another, open-mouthed, appears startled. They are wearing what must be their best dresses and coats. One has a large white bib. A Christmas tree, festooned with streamers, baubles and stars, stands majestically in the background. All the adults look very solemn, are smiling gravely and seem transfixed by the camera. There is an air of seriousness about them that contradicts the nature of the occasion.

  The other photograph contains just my father and myself and it has been cut out from a larger group photograph. Who cut it out? Probably my mother. Why? It’s the same evening, yes, but my jacket has been taken off and I’m sitting cross-legged, left ankle over right, my hands clasped, left thumb over right. I appear to be pouting, bottom lip protruding, eyes again upturned, as if distracted or bored.

  This is the photograph that always fascinates me, that I find the most revealing personally. To see a child running, at play, or being active, even smiling, is something worth remembering, worth capturing on film, but the inactive child, the one who will sit and say nothing, refuse to respond to an adult’s question or smile for the camera, is seen as someone who is not worth wasting film on.

  Yet there I am, just like that.

  Just as I am today.

  When I sit down and stretch my legs or sit with my foot under me, it’s the left ankle that crosses over the right. When I clasp my hands, the left thumb goes over the right. My bottom lip sticks out when I consider a situation or gaze upwards to consider a question. How much have I essentially changed in five decades?

  How much of what happened later that night has influenced my attitude towards drinking and given me a fear of drunks?

  The small boy looking away from the camera is the same child who will shortly see a drunken man break into the hall where the party is being held and make a lunge for his mother. The drunk will grab her and attempt to kiss her. When the boy’s father comes to her rescue the drunk will wheel about, throw the mother aside and produce a knife from somewhere and hold it to the father’s throat, threatening to slash it if the woman doesn’t go with him. All this the small boy remembers, and he will be told more of the story in later years, when he persists and asks questions about the photograph and his parents can no longer ignore him. His mother will tell him that he went “crazy” and screamed when the knife was held to his father’s throat, that he screamed and distracted the drunk. Somehow, miraculously, the drunk was disarmed without causing any harm to anyone. Police arrived. He was taken away and put into a cell whose floor was covered in water so that he would sober up more quickly, so that he would never forget the nature of justice in a German cell.

  We walk back in the cold dark, in the drifting snow.

  Lights from the barracks have been turned off or down to a minimum, to preserve electricity. Those that remain along the paths create an eerie light that makes it appear we are walking on the moon’s surface. There is no joy in seeing the presents that dangle from my parents’ hands. I cling to my mother and bury my face in her neck. My father’s arm encircles us, and both parents quicken their pace to get indoors quickly. My father keeps reassuring my mother that he is unharmed. He refers to her as dziecko, “child”. He is twelve years older than her, and this is a term of endearment.

  Except for the wind blowing against us and the buildings we’re walking between, there are no other sounds. All sounds of Christmas have faded. No one sings Cicha Noc, and it will be a long time before I hear “Silent Night” sung in Polish. Next year there will be strains of it, but these will be intermingled with a new language, English, and though the melody will be the same, the feelings will be different because there will be no snow.

  Our rooms are nearby and that means warmth and safety.

  We pass by windows where lights are low or have been extinguished. I have learnt to distinguish between light from a globe and light from a candle. These are mostly lights from candles.

  One by one, my thoughts fall into rhythm with their steps, and I realise my parents are speaking about the “new home” we will be sailing to. Soon, our application will be approved, they are saying. Or am I dreaming it? The new country is a safe country, without wars, where people can make their dreams come true. They have said all this before, but in the dark, and after the attack in the hall, there is tension in their voices.

  Again they speak about leaving. The sooner the better, they both agree.

  The snow sweeps across our faces, buries their conversation in the darkness that is Christmas morning.

  I can hear very little, and I bury my face even deeper into my mother’s neck, snuggle against her. She asks something, but I can’t make it out.

  The rabbits, my father replies. Ah yes, now, the rabbits …

  Water

  The Red Sea was never red except at sunset. In the wake of the ship, the furrows of foam quickly turned from white to red, to dark blue and black. The further the ship ploughed into the night, the more quickly the red turned into black.

  After crossing the Equator, passengers slept on deck because of the heat. Men lounged about shirtless; many wore shorts. Women wore summer frocks and sun hats. Children ran about in bare feet and sandals.

  What did these people talk about? Did they discuss families that they had lost track of, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters? How was the journey across the Red Sea to a new country meant to compensate for the loss of a homeland? Who was waiting at the other end of the sea journey to answer their questions?

  In 1964 my parents bought a family c
ar, an EH Holden, and, as neither parent drove, I became the family chauffeur. On one occasion we decided on a trip to Shellharbour, on the New South Wales South Coast, where I’d arranged to meet a schoolmate, Kevin Coates, and his parents. Kevin and I met in 1961 at St Patrick’s College, Strathfield. We failed to matriculate in our first attempt at the Leaving Certificate but on our second try in 1963 we succeeded. Now we were in our first year at Sydney University, studying Arts, and thought this would be an opportunity for the two families to meet. A picnic by the sea.

  No sooner did the ocean come into view as we drove down Mount Ousley, nearing Wollongong, than my mother began to complain of feeling seasick. Seasick? How could that be? The ocean was still miles away.

  You can’t be feeling seasick, Mum, I said.

  I can feel the ship rocking. It’s the voyage all over again. Oh glory be … God help us!

  It’s in your mind, Mum.

  Here I was, behind the steering wheel of a car that my parents had paid for, presuming to tell my mother what she could or could not be feeling.

  I know what she means, my father said. I feel the same sensation if I look at the ocean for too long.

  Impossible. You’re both wrong.

  For the rest of the day I listened to my mother complain about the bad time she was having by being so near the water. She sat with her back to the water. My father seemed to tolerate the situation more stoically, though I sensed that he, too, was uneasy at having being brought to Shellharbour.

  They got on splendidly with the Coates family, however.

  I failed to understand my parents’ reluctance to accept the ocean as something beautiful, and in those early years of our migration I also failed to understand a deeper and more poignant reason to be drawn into associations with their exile; it had to with their loss, with the word żal. Literally, it means “sadness” or “sorrow” or “grief”, but it has a depth to it that no English word can capture, certainly not in three letters. Anglo-Australians, especially literary critics and academics, often confuse it with sentimentality and a lack of irony in the work of European immigrants, failing to understand the deep psychological and emotional issues in the heart of the immigrant. In doing so, they reveal their own ignorance of the state of being of Europeans and sometimes display an inner fear of being demonstrative themselves, of exhibiting their own feelings, especially men, in public.