The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  That night I stayed at 10 Mary Street. For the church service my intention had been to just give the facts of my father’s life, and to read the poem about him that was on the New South Wales Higher School Certificate Reading List. Instead, I wrote a eulogy that included the poem.

  Next morning there were more people at St Felix’s than I had expected. Many of my parents’ generation had already passed away; I’d attended their funeral services in this same church. My strongest memories of the church, however, were of attending midnight Mass at Christmas many times when I was younger and the congregation singing of the Word becoming Flesh — memories of my heart and soul being filled with awe and inspiration, as these people from Poland and their descendants in Australia raised their voices in praise and thanksgiving to the God of Creation for their lives and their faith.

  We sat in the front pew, on the left-hand side of the church, behind the coffin that’d been placed between us and the altar. Father Kołodziej wore a chasuble, more purple than blue, that contrasted with the red and white flowers on the coffin. I sat next to my mother.

  A remoteness settled into my mind that I hadn’t anticipated, a detachment from my feelings of grief. Why wasn’t I crying? That was the part that bothered me.

  Later, looking at the photographs that a friend took during the Mass, there seems to be someone there who wasn’t me, as I understand “me”. It was almost as if I had become another person, that I wasn’t Kornelia’s son, or Kate’s husband or the father of Judy, Andrew and Anna, all of whom sat in the pew with me. I was part of the congregation, but if I’d allowed myself to become involved in it emotionally, there and then, perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to see it for the farewell to Feliks that it was, the tribute to his life and the celebration, in an external, religious sense, of his entry into Heaven.

  Two moments of the service do stand out in my mind, nonetheless. The first moment was Father Kołodziej’s praising my father as a good man, a hard worker, who survived the war and made a new life for himself and his family in Australia. A patriot, also, the man who never stopped loving or believing in Poland, its history and traditions; but he was also the Catholic man, the man baptised in Christ who lived that spiritual life in a practical sense by continuing to receive the sacraments all his life and never lost his faith.

  The second moment was the lifting of the coffin lid so that my mother and I could say goodbye to him. It would be the last time I’d see his physical presence. His face had been covered by a square silk cloth like a handkerchief. I lifted it. His face was unchanged from the night before. Cold. Dead. At peace, whatever that meant in the world he was travelling through.

  I remembered the phrase he’d used all his life whenever anybody asked him how he’d got from one place to another when there was no public transport — like the times he’d come to visit us in the camp in Parkes and there’d been no one to give him a lift from the railway station. Na piechotę, he’d say, “on foot”. Well, Dad, I thought, you’re not travelling “on foot” anymore. Wherever you are, I hope you’re soaring on invisible wings, gliding, relaxing. You deserve it.

  At the end of the Mass I delivered my eulogy; I reiterated some points that Father Kołodziej had made. The night before I’d got up around midnight and written down what I knew in my heart I wished to say but, until that moment, didn’t quite know how to start.

  I stated the facts of his life — birth, family, life on a farm, capture by the Nazis, forced labour in northern Germany for five years. His meeting with my mother in Lebenstedt Displaced Persons camp when I was three years old and their decision to emigrate to Australia. In general terms I described their life in Australia, what buying a home meant to both parents and how hard they worked to establish those front and back gardens. My father didn’t believe in “sickies”, I told them. The only time he had to take time off work was when he had a cancerous growth in his foot. That required an operation in Auburn District Hospital. There were two operations, in fact, because the wound refused to heal and he required a skin graft. He returned to work after his convalescence and rarely spoke about the operations. I told the congregation that he and my mother and that generation of exiles helped to make Australia what it had become. They were immigrants, part of the exodus from Europe, who arrived in the country before there were social “freebies”. They made the most of the opportunities the country had to offer and took nothing for granted. I spoke of what his three grandchildren meant to him and how much he loved them. I mentioned in Polish the special terms of affection he used when they visited 10 Mary Street.

  Finally, I said, in Greek mythology a hero was one who was sacrificed to Hera, wife of Zeus. Well, Dad, you made the sacrifices and survived, and that makes you a “hero” in a different sense of the word. I salute you and am proud to have your name.

  To finish, I read the poem I wrote on 19 October 1971.

  Feliks Skrzynecki

  My gentle father

  kept pace only with the Joneses

  of his own mind's making —

  loved his garden like an only child,

  spent years walking its perimeter

  from sunrise to sleep.

  Alert, brisk and silent,

  he swept its paths

  ten times around the world.

  Hands darkened

  from cement, fingers with cracks

  like the sods he broke,

  I often wondered how he existed

  on five or six hours’ sleep each night —

  why his arms didn’t fall off

  from the soil he turned

  and tobacco he rolled.

  His Polish friends

  always shook hands too violently

  I thought … Feliks Skrzynecki,

  that formal address

  I never got used to.

  Talking, they reminisced

  about farms where paddocks flowered

  with corn and wheat,

  horses they bred, pigs

  they were skilled in slaughtering.

  Five years of forced labour in Germany

  did not dull the softness of his blue eyes.

  I never once heard him

  complain of work, the weather

  or pain. When twice

  they dug cancer out of his foot,

  his comment was, “but I’m alive.”

  Growing older, I

  remember words he taught me,

  remnants of a language

  I inherited unknowingly —

  the curse that damned

  a crew-cut, grey-haired

  Department clerk

  who asked me in dancing-bear grunts,

  “Did your father ever attempt to learn English?”

  On the back steps of his house,

  bordered by golden cypress,

  lawns — geraniums younger

  than both parents,

  my father sits out the evening

  with his dog, smoking,

  watching stars and street lights come on,

  content as I have never been.

  At thirteen,

  stumbling over tenses in Caesar’s Gallic War,

  I forgot my first Polish word.

  He repeated it so I never forgot.

  After that, like a dumb prophet,

  watched me pegging my tents

  further and further south of Hadrian’s Wall.

  In 1978 my parents purchased a family plot in the old Polish Section in Rookwood Cemetery. On a slope facing the west, below a line of brushbox trees, over the two plots, suitable for taking four coffins, a black marble headstone was erected with my parents’ names and birthdates cut and painted in gold. When we visited the stonemason after Dad’s death, Mum arranged to have the date of Dad’s death added and an enamelled photograph fixed to the centre of the headstone. Both parents had chosen their photographs when the plot was purchased — both selected their passport photographs. At first I thought this was a strange choice. Dad was eighty-nine when he
died, and in the photograph he’s in his mid-forties. Mum is in her early thirties in her photograph. I wondered how old she’d be when she died.

  But in the visits I’ve made to this section of the cemetery, I’ve noticed over the years that there are many such enamelled photographs. Poles who were in their sixties, seventies and eighties when they died, yet with photographs on their headstones from their passports or taken decades earlier.

  When I travelled to Poland in 1989 I visited the graves of my father’s parents in the cemetery in Raciborow. It was never requested of me, but I returned with a handful of soil that I knew I would sprinkle on my father’s coffin on the day of his funeral. Thick, heavy, black, almost like sand, the soil was kept in a sealed plastic bag. My father never once asked me its purpose, but, in the intervening years, I would occasionally take out the bag and see how the black grains were turning into grey dust.

  When we arrived at the cemetery the grave had been prepared. The pallbearers carried the coffin from the hearse and laid it across the green coverlet. The rosewood coffin looked magnificent in the sunlight, shining the colour of lacquered blood. The floral tribute on top shone even brighter.

  A decade of the rosary was said. A hymn was sung in Polish and the coffin blessed with holy water. Father Kołodziej performed the ceremony with dignity, with the utmost respect and care. I could not fault anything he did. I remember thinking, How many times has he done this? Yet it was like he was performing it for the first time.

  The coffin was lowered, the ropes withdrawn, and it was time for the family and myself to sprinkle the soil from Poland. Father announced this and boy, oh boy, you should have seen the stampede towards me. One man, Mr Pilsudski, rushed forward like a long-legged spider so quickly, hand held out, that he almost tripped and fell into the grave. Others followed him, mostly men. Polska ziemia! they repeated. “Polish soil”. I asked them to stand back so that my mother and I, and my children, could sprinkle it first. It was like they were rushing forward to be fed. When the Polish soil had all been sprinkled, many still dipped their fingers into the empty plastic bag — as if the air itself was sacred. The mourners then dropped a small lump of soil or clay onto the coffin to symbolise our union with the deceased and acknowledging that we, too, one day, would follow him. Some people dropped flowers.

  I stayed at Mum’s the next two nights and drove her to the cemetery where she “tidied up” the grave, as she put it. For her that meant crying, praying, standing there and talking to Dad as if he were alive and in good health. It meant cleaning spots of dirt and water that’d splashed on to the marble; she’d brought along Ajax cleaner, a bucket, brush and several cleaning cloths. It also meant rearranging the flowers in the vases and the floral tributes, already soaked in moisture and decomposing in their cellophane wrappers. For me, it meant standing there and listening to everything she said to him about their life.

  On Sunday night I returned home. Whatever “normal” meant, life was returning to its old pace and routines. Work. Supervising examinations. Departmental meetings. Shopping at Franklins. Spreading topsoil on the back lawn. Taking the car to Tony Garnett’s West City Holden for servicing. Going to Mass. Visiting Mum … And sleep. Lots of it. As much as I could get.

  Monday, 18 July 1994

  Midnight

  I’m in Room 33 of the Murwillumbah Motor Inn. Unable to sleep, I’ve been writing poetry about my father. Later today I’ll be teaching Year 12 at St Patrick’s College, a local Catholic high school. I’ve been invited to fly up to northern New South Wales and speak on Immigrant Chronicle.

  I actually arrived on the Saturday night; because this is familiar territory to me, I decided to come before the Monday and have a whole day to myself.

  It was here, in 1968, on the south arm of the Tweed River, that I received my second teaching posting, to a small school in a little village called Kunghur, half an hour’s drive out of town.

  When I made the booking I specifically asked for a room with a view of Mount Warning, the outstanding geographic monument that dominates the Tweed Valley. When I taught here, its presence — physically, mentally, spiritually — would occupy my thoughts for hours on end … Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Its peak is the first part of Australia to be touched by the rays of the rising sun. It figures in Aboriginal mythology, and there are many legends associated with its creation. It is supposed to be the central link in Australia’s mandala of stones.

  On Sunday I went to Mass and spent the greater part of the morning walking around Murwillumbah, taking photographs, revisiting old shopping streets and walking along the Tweed River where it flows alongside the Pacific Highway.

  Lush green vegetation.

  Sugar cane plantations.

  Banana plantations.

  The old bridge standing beside the new bridge, near the railway station, along the road that brings the visitor into town.

  Giant palm trees growing along the river.

  Blue. Green. Blue. Green.

  I can feel the energy of light.

  Smell the vegetation.

  Hear roots growing in the earth.

  How many times did the locals tell me back in 1968 that this was “God’s own country”?

  But as I was writing the poetry, I looked back on the day and I knew that the walk I took was not just a stroll through yesterday’s shadows. Something had been happening inside me; I can’t say exactly when it entered my blood, but a terrible longing, żal, was building up in me, pulling me slowly but surely back to my father’s death. I began to miss him like I hadn’t missed him in the three weeks since he’d died. My body was hit with spasms as I walked, like I was having stomach cramps. I would sob, but the tears just wouldn’t break. It lasted most of the day, even when I took myself to the Regent in the afternoon to see Farewell My Concubine … But it was there, in the darkness, that the first tears came, hot and fast, not loud and bawling, but soft. A weeping. A steady continuous weeping.

  Why couldn’t I have cried like that in the church of St Felix de Valois in Bankstown, when I sat like a ghost, almost like I wasn’t there? Or by the graveside, surrounded by family and friends? Or at Mum’s? Why did it have to be here, in a movie theatre only half full, so far from home, among strangers?

  As I wrote, the shape of Mount Warning loomed over the horizon like an ancient deity that I could see in my mind’s eye — the same shape that followed me everywhere I went in 1968, at whose foothills my small school nestled like a red-capped bird. All the time watching. Watching. Saying nothing. But watching. Speaking to me like an older brother or sister might. Or a parent. Or a teacher. Or God. And the longing for my father, his presence, there, all the time, drawing me towards something dark and strong, a long wide river, perhaps, something I knew I’d never understand, but ultimately that didn’t matter, because I’d already accepted it and written the poem that’d helped me as I floundered through the darkness and then out of it.

  Alone in Murwillumbah

  The effect you had on me was the effect

  you could not help having.

  — Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

  Going to Mass

  at the Church of the Sacred Heart,

  I pray for my father

  who died three weeks ago today —

  so far from here, but still

  in my heart: the Polish immigrant

  who lies buried under

  dying flowers in Rookwood’s graveyard.

  Revisiting the old haunts

  of twenty-six years ago

  where I taught in this green valley

  and daily became homesick

  like a lost child —

  I take photos of Mount Warning,

  the Tweed River

  and various streets: as if to remind

  myself later, in Sydney, that I was actually here.

  To fill the hours

  of late afternoon, I go

  to the Regent and see

  Farewell My Concubine —

  dr
awn by what I remember

  as being favourable reviews.

  Something inside me reacts

  to the violence, to scenes

  of death and pain —

  something I can’t put my finger on

  but find myself weeping for

  in the dark: grateful

  for the peace my father

  had brought into my life.

  Walking home

  the old contours

  of roads and hills return —

  familiar though grown smaller:

  Riverview Street,

  Wollumbin, Byangum Road.

  Darkness blots out

  the shape of Mount Warning

  from which I’ve always got my bearings.

  “It’s all right, Dad,” I whisper.

  “Stay with me.

  I know exactly where I’m going.”

  Closed Venetian Blinds

  Thursday, 6 February 1997

  The sun’s intensity is apparent even before it begins its morning climb. It’s supposed to be the end of summer but it’s just as bad as over Christmas and during January. Hot. Sticky and hot. Try to get the day’s chores over by lunchtime and then stay indoors with the airconditioner turned on.

  In the morning, driving over to Hale and Iremonger, I kept reliving last night at Mum’s.

  Again I could feel the strange atmosphere in the house, the almost static breathing of the house, as if everything in it was paused on the brink of an abyss, holding its breath, waiting for something to happen. There was no tension. All apprehensions were gone. The hard words, the anger, the stress and trials of past years were gone. I remembered when, a few months earlier, I’d asked her to tell me my biological father’s name and she did. She also drew my attention to a small photograph in the box where she’d kept my First Holy Communion medal and other souvenirs. The photograph is of three men. He’s the one in front, she said.

  But it was just my mother and myself, watching a black-and-white movie about an old man’s achievements and memories. We were having a cup of tea, watching images on a TV screen, listening to words and the silences between them. Then her sudden dismissal of me, her abstract statement in Polish, “No, what will be will be.” My farewell to her. The kiss. The hug. Telling her that I loved her. The promise to ring today.