The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  None of us mentioned the incident with Christine.

  I wasn’t game enough to bring up the subject and my parents carried on as if nothing unusual had happened that afternoon. When we finished eating I was told to go and have my bath and get ready for bed. That part of the evening was normal. After my bath I usually did my homework, read comics or a book or listened to radio serials.

  Both parents came to see me together when I was in bed. Usually they came in separately to say goodnight.

  About this evening, my father said. It should not have happened …

  She dared me! I interjected, almost yelling it out, and for a moment it seemed that the scene with the wooden spoon was to be repeated.

  It should not have happened as it did … He picked up the sentences calmly, wisely, as if he knew beforehand that I was going to interrupt.

  Throwing the stone at Christine was wrong — and yes, we know that she dared you — but defying your mother and father was a different kind of wrong.

  How?

  It’s called disobedience, my mother said. You don’t say no to your parents, especially in front of someone who could cause us trouble. You know what a lot of Australians think about migrants. You have seen plenty of evidence of it. Why don’t you remember that next time and create a good example?

  In the Ten Commandments you are told to Honour “your father and your mother”, are you not? my father asked.

  Yes, I replied meekly. Somehow mentioning the Ten Commandments meant God and all the divine power that God could use against you. Hell?… Fire?… Eternal punishment?… Pain?… My mouth barely opened and the words crept out like a cautious mouse. I’m sorry, Mum and Dad. Sorry that I disobeyed you. As soon as the apology was spoken my mother put her arms around me, gave me a hug and comforted me, and so did my father. The pain from the welts was non-existent. The incident of the afternoon dissolved in another watery blur.

  Coming out into the garden next day felt strange, leaving by the front gate and walking through the vacant allotment from where I’d thrown the stone. There were bruises on the backs of my legs.

  Judy is in the lounge room. The TV is turned off and she’s taken out Mum’s photo albums.

  One album has a white cover, another is blue, a third is red and the fourth, the slimmest, has an image of the Sydney Botanic Gardens on front and back covers. In the background rises the Opera House and the top of the Harbour Bridge. It’s the kind of album made for tourists. When did my mother buy it? Perhaps she was attracted to the bright flowers on the covers, the palm trees, green grass and flowerbeds of salvias, marigolds and petunias — the kinds of flowers that she grew in her own front garden.

  Judy is holding up a black-and-white photograph. Look at this one, Dad — you were so little.

  Between closing of the garage and returning to the house, I have calculated that it is seventy-eight days since my mother died.

  Seven plus eight equals fifteen. One plus five equals six. Six is the number of the house I live in. Six is the day wrongly given as my birth date by Frau Horst, the German midwife who registered my birth. It was in the last days of the Third Reich. Money was running out. To qualify for her payment the midwife added me to the list of babies born the previous week. She received her money and I became a day older. My mother recounted that story, without regret, many times. I would complain that this shouldn’t have been done. My mother asked me to try and see it from the woman’s point of view. She explained that an extra day didn’t really matter to one’s life. I disagreed and still do. When I travelled to Germany in 1989, into that district in the north known as Westphalia, and, more specifically, as Das Sauerland, and met the midwife, she gave me the gift that my mother had sent her some time after she was moved into one of the Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany: a photograph of my mother and myself.

  The one that Judy is holding.

  I am between eighteen months and two years old. There are thistles or prickly weeds of some kind growing out of sandy soil, almost surrounding us. It would appear that I am sitting in these, but in fact I am leaning against my mother who has put her head against mine. She is smiling; I am frowning. A small posey has been pinned above my left pocket. She has dressed me in lace-up booties, long white socks; my shorts are buttoned to my shirt and two of the large buttons shine like polished coins. My hair is neatly combed. She is wearing what she would have called “a good dress”. A large thick clump of weeds is growing in the foreground like a sea anemone. She is holding my right hand in her right hand, probably telling me to smile. As with the Christmas photograph, I wonder who took this one? Why did my mother choose it to send to the midwife? When the old woman returned it to me in 1989, she said, in broken English, Now you can tell your mother, because I have seen you, she can have it back. She saw me looking at the letter in her hand, a letter from the same envelope out of which she’d taken the photograph. But not the letter. I will keep the letter. When I examined the letter I knew immediately it was in my mother’s handwriting. Forty years hadn’t changed it that much, plus there was her name signed at the bottom. Another surprise was seeing the letter written in German. Until recently, when my mother re-established contact with the people who were her employers in Germany during World War II, I never knew that she could write in German, although I had heard her speak the language as I was growing up. Later, in Australia, when I questioned her about the letter, she replied nonchalantly that it was something she’d learnt in Germany before and during the war, but now she had forgotten it mostly. Returning the photograph and showing me the letter seemed to have been important for Frau Horst — as if she were keeping her part of a pact made between them.

  While we were talking her son came in. He’d been living in Bavaria and had returned to his mother’s house for the summer. He explained this, or at least I believed that was what he was saying, as well as telling me he was a hunter and one day would come to Australia to do some hunting. He was a giant of a man, huge, barely fitting through the doors of the house. He had to stoop in order to pass from room to room. When we shook hands, my hand must have fitted into a quarter of his palm. Sensing my discomfort, he let go quickly and his booming laughter filled the house.

  At one point in the meeting, both mother and son saw me looking at an aerial photograph on the wall. Dark green predominantly, it is of a mountain valley. Grey roads snake through it and divide blocks of cleared land on which homes have been built. Red and white shapes. Roofs. Houses. In the middle, slightly in the upper left corner, is “The White House” — the house in which my mother worked. I have already been shown her room, a gabled outlook upon trees and hills, its roof so low, and at an angle, that one has to stoop. I will learn that German law was changed at one point during the war and servants who were not Germans were not allowed to live in the same house as their masters. That is when my mother was moved out and into her permanent quarters. Across the road from the house, through the trees, runs a small track, quite discernible, and it leads downhill to a factory. Behind the factory is a row of green huts, “barracks”, as my mother referred to them. At the end of this row, in the last two rooms, are my mother’s quarters. Members of the family who employed my mother have been acting as my hosts. They have shown me over the house and the barracks, and brought me to the midwife.

  Frau Horst sees me continuing to look at the photograph. Would you like to have it? she asks.

  I can’t answer because there’s a lump in my throat.

  Have it — take it! her son calls out. Leaps up. He takes me by the hand again, as if to congratulate me, and his booming laughter fills the room like a depth-charge echo. I can get another one! He takes the picture down from the wall, out of its frame and puts it with my bag. Your first home in the world — all ready to go to Australia!

  The photograph is associated with the deepest memory I have, not just of Germany, but of life itself, the memory that has troubled me and of which I couldn’t speak for decades, until a meeting in 1969 with Doctor Fran
k Croll, a doctor who was treating me for burst ulcers in Sydney, brought my first remembered utterance about it.

  Today the aerial photograph hangs in my office, to the left of the desk where I work, above photographs of my family and various friends.

  What’s the matter, Dad? Judy asks. You seem upset. What’s wrong?

  Nothing. I’m not upset about anything.

  I explain how the photograph came into our possession and why it’s so special, but then, I think, aren’t all of these photographs special? There must be images in those four albums that I haven’t seen for years, maybe decades. We sit on the couch and begin looking through them.

  There is no special order or arrangement, although in one my mother has written in Polish, in the index, three entries, all dated 9.11.86. Translated, the names of the photographs read, sequentially, front of house, Feliks and Peter in front of kitchen, side of the house from the street.

  Then it strikes me. The date! It’s her birthday! The ninth of November! She began these entries on her birthday in 1986! Was the album a birthday gift from someone — or something she’d saved up for a special occasion?

  We turn the pages and confront scenes from both our lives that are strange and familiar. My father nursing Judy on the front lawn under the rose bushes. Both are smiling. Her chubby cheeks are apple-red and her dress is pink. She is holding something black, possibly a purse or a cuddly toy. My father is wearing his brown Akubra hat and has his sleeves rolled up. The date on the back reads 20.10.1973. That means Judy is seventeen months old. Alongside that photograph is a smaller one, taken on a Kodak Instamatic camera, one of my father holding my son, Andrew. The inscription and date on the back reads Mother’s Day 11.5.75. Andrew is thirteen months old, plump as a potato, and is lying back, securely cradled in my father’s left arm, pleased as Punch, smiling almost demurely. What does that smile mean?

  My father is wearing a grey-blue cardigan and a blood-red corduroy shirt. The shirt matches the red sleeves of Andrew’s pullover and the red, white and blue checks of the pattern on his chest. The photograph was taken in the back yard of 10 Mary Street, in between two adjacent walls. The green and white patterns of the pillow on the reclining deck chair contrast with the red bricks in the background. Behind all this, a white downpipe, appearing out of nowhere and disappearing the same way, runs the length of the brick wall like a broadsword.

  So it goes, delving further into the past, with leaps into forgotten scenes and an array of faces from the Ukraine, Poland, the Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany and the migrant camps in Australia — photographs taken in Regents Park, Bankstown, Strathfield, Lidcombe, Bondi, Shellharbour, places where we have lived, worked, visited or played. Parents. Children. My wife. My ex-wife. Relatives. Friends. Faces whose names I have forgotten. Faces whose names I will never forget. Young. Old. Christenings. Birthdays. First Holy Communion. Weddings. Funerals. Indoor settings and outdoor settings. Group photographs and people posing alone or in pairs.

  A small rectangular photograph shows me sitting, barefooted, legs stretched out, in a garden alongside another small boy, also barefooted. A ladder has been propped against a wall behind us; a retaining wall runs below a dense row of foliage. The grass is thick and we are sitting on a blanket. The other boy is holding a section of a newspaper in one hand, as if offering it. His blond hair falls over his forehead and he is biting his bottom lip, squinting. He is wearing shorts and a cardigan that is unbuttoned. My shirt is long-sleeved, buttoned to the neck. My black hair contrasts with his and I am wearing a pair of knitted trousers with bib and braces. Another part of the newspaper is folded over my legs. The date on the back of the photograph reads 30 September 1950.

  I am five years old. The blond-haired boy’s name is Allan, and he is the same boy that I argued with and then cried because I felt left out when he received a toy carpentry set for his birthday.

  The next photograph that Judy points out is of Anna, her half-sister (my mother has written Anna 2 years underneath it). Anna is standing behind her stroller with her doll, Cindy, in it. There is a brown-and-white cuddly toy on Cindy’s lap. Cindy’s plastic shoes are red, her socks are white and her dress is pink and white. Anna is wearing red socks, white sandals, pink tracksuit pants, a red skivvy and a floral pinafore made up of hibiscus patterns. They are in the back garden of 10 Mary Street and in front of one of the camellia bushes growing outside the kitchen window. When I come over to water the garden after my mother’s death, it is the camellia bushes that get watered first. Clusters of petals have fallen to the ground, creating a carpet over the sandstone and soil of the garden bed. Behind the camellia bush, almost obscured, is a tall fuschia bush, its red and purple flowers drooping like bells.

  Like Judy in her photograph, Anna has chubby cheeks. Her face, round as a ripe peach, is almost serious, halfway between enquiring and bemused. She knows she is the centre of attention here, in charge of the scene, and she will maintain that pose no matter what else might happen. As they grow older, I have begun to notice how similar Andrew and Anna are in their attitudes and habits, in their control of a moment. Both can be supreme, intractable. The earth could shudder, trees fall, a tidal wave appear on the horizon, yet neither would flinch, retreat from their stand, change their facial expression.

  What are you thinking, Dad?

  Falling trees and tidal waves.

  Huh?

  Never mind.

  Dad, do you want to have some lunch?

  Sure, why not? I’m glad the topic is changed. I suggest to her we drive up to Kentucky Fried at Yagoona and bring back some lunch. She agrees.

  At Yagoona, however, we decide to eat there, to sit at one of the front tables and watch the traffic on the Hume Highway. The flow of motor vehicles is nonstop, even on this, a public holiday, even with traffic lights at the top of the hill to our right, and to our left, slightly further towards the railway station.

  I tell her about an old school friend, Malcolm MacGregor, who lived at Yagoona and whose home I used to visit on weekends.

  He had a dental plate in his top front teeth and would slip it in and out of his mouth whenever he wanted to shock someone at school or make us laugh … and laugh we did. It was a novelty that never wore off. Funny how you remember things about people, and how people are associated with a place. If we hadn’t decided to come to Yagoona, who knows how long it would have been before I thought of Malcolm McGregor again?

  Have you got any photos of him?

  I do — in the old Lumens, the school year-books of St Pat’s.

  Other memories are jogged by being here at this location, by the Hume Highway and the sight of shops opposite us. It was from here that I would purchase takeaway lunches for my mother whenever she expressed a wish to have chicken pieces for lunch. She believed in the taste of the “Colonel’s” recipe of “secret” herbs and spices.

  I think about this.

  Secret? What does that mean? I don’t believe secrets really exist. They are facts in the world that are only relative to what we know or don’t know about life. Death annihilates life and life begets more life. I believe that is the great mystery, the “secret” of life. Once you have discovered that for yourself, there is no mystery.

  We leave in silence, return to the empty house, shut up and grown warm in our absence.

  I had hoped I might see some “diggers” on the streets, some hint of public activity to suggest the nature of this public holiday. Instead, I see plenty of Asian and Middle Eastern faces, ethnic types who have made Australia their home in the last three decades and settled permanently in this part of Sydney. I wonder what Anzac Day means to them? To their children? How are they celebrating it? How many of them attended the Dawn Service in Martin Place or marched down George Street?

  Dad, I’m going to have to go, Judy says, almost apologetically.

  Sure, that’s fine … Whenever you’re ready. I’ll put away all these things. I’ve nothing else to do.

  Are you sure you’re alrig
ht?

  Why wouldn’t I be?

  Oh, I don’t know.

  We say our goodbyes at the front door and I see her out into the street. I thank her for all her help, and for her company. I say, And Babci thanks you, too.

  She drives off, slows down at the end of the street and waves. The car horn sounds its beep beep and she is gone, right into Clapham Road and off towards her home in Merrylands.

  I return to the house and pack the photo albums into the linen press. But as I close the linen press door, a realisation strikes me. All the photographs that I scrutinised with Judy were of children, my children and myself as a child. Was this intentional? I don’t remember consciously choosing the photos I deliberated over. Was I searching for some resemblance between them and myself?

  The colours of the carpet beneath my feet acquire a life, begin to move, as if on a conveyor belt. Yet I am stationary.

  I am sweating. My mother’s presence fills the space to my left, the entrance to her bedroom. She is beside me, watching, but saying nothing. She is not the old woman who died in February. She is young, dressed in floral colours, a bright summer dress. Her hair is dark, thick, wavy. She is beautiful. She stands looking down, as if to examine what I’m doing. But what am I doing?

  The colours begin to slow down and return to static patterns on a carpet. The giddiness has stopped. The sweating continues. My hands continue to perform whatever it is they were doing, as if they have become disembodied. Wiping my eyes, I see that I am undoing the brown bag, flicking through the photo albums until I find the photograph from Germany, the gift from Frau Horst. I put it into my shirt pocket. The bag is stowed in the linen cupboard and I shut it with an extra hard push.