Paris and Other Disappointments

by Adam Rozenbachs

  As a child I dreaded the visits to my grandparents’ house. Every Saturday morning, after the weekly supermarket shop, we’d head over to Mum’s parents for what was probably about one hour but felt more like three or four months. It was nothing personal; I liked them, but their house was how I imagined life to be like under a communist regime. It was completely devoid of any current pop culture, the technology was at least a decade behind, and it seemed no one cared that the TV didn’t have a remote control or any red hues, rendering cartoons almost unwatchable.

  Going outside wasn’t an option either. The house was built on such a steep block that any attempt at sports resulted in the ball, and the participant chasing it, gathering excess momentum and slamming hard into the back fence. Funny as it was when it happened to my brother, we all decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

  Instead I created my own ‘fun’, such as locking the bathroom door with no one inside. I knew full well the door’s locking system – a button pushed into the knob that would pop out and unlock when you turned the knob – shouldn’t be activated on exit, because it could only be unlocked from the inside. But I wanted to see what would happen. Which was exactly what I’d thought: the next person who needed to use the bathroom couldn’t get inside.

  This brought up the question of who had used the bathroom last. All sibling fingers pointed to me, but I played dumb as to how this freak accident of engineering occurred. The adults were forced to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It could happen to anyone’ they reasoned, aware it had never happened to anyone.

  Eventually Mum’s cousin was hoisted through the tiny bathroom window and unlocked the door from the inside.

  Visits home to my parents are still trying, Mum filling silences by updating me on people I’ve never met. The blank look on my face lets her know I don’t care, but she ploughs on defiantly, informing me, ‘Val from number seventy-three is having trouble with people parking on her nature strip again.’ I’d remind her I don’t know who Val is, as I haven’t lived in the street in twenty-five years, but Mum always viewed facts like that as mere speed bumps on the irrelevant-information highway.

  Meeting family went against everything Dad had stood for my entire life. ‘I wouldn’t know them from a bar of soap!’ was the cry we’d hear whenever we’d talk about relatives from Germany. Dad always dismissed any thought of meeting them in Germany or letting them visit us if they happened to be in Australia. He reasoned they were strangers, so what was the point of caring about them?

  But once he had committed to the trip he really didn’t have too much choice. It would be a fair slap in the face to travel halfway around the world, be in the very same city, and not bother getting in touch. It also helped that my cousin had met the same relatives a few years earlier, and there was no way Dad was about to let anyone show him up.

  On the drive through Munich’s suburbs, Dad was clearly nervous, but as was his style he didn’t want to let on. His outwardly calm demeanour was undone when I told him he had a speck of dried blood on his face from a shaving cut – he fired back, ‘Leave me alone.’ It wasn’t quite lashing out, but it was enough of an overreaction to tell me meeting these ‘bars of soap’ meant something to him. Instead of telling him he should relax a little, I decided to let it go, adding to the legend that is The Greatest Son in the History of Earth.

  Walking into a stranger’s house on the other side of the world, we could not have had a warmer reception. We were shown into the dining room, adorned with family photos on the walls, trinkets gathered over the years spread about on various shelves, and even an owl figurine, which every mum seems to have for some unknown reason. Our hosts did everything they could to make us feel welcome as we sat down for afternoon coffee, tea and cake. Not that I’d have expected anything else; they were hardly going to go to the effort of having us over and then make us watch Who Wants to Be a Bavarian Millionaire? Still, a potentially cold situation was instantly comforting, like sitting on a warm toilet seat on a fresh morning.

  I wasn’t entirely clear who was who in relation to Dad. There was Hildegunde, whose house it was, and Inge, who knew Hildegunde enough to be let in the house. She may have been a neighbour, but since we were there I guessed she was a relation of some sort. Both used Dad’s full name, Thomas (pronounced Two-muss), which I enjoyed for its endearing, childlike connotations. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him called Thomas. I mostly called him Tommy or, if it was a formal occasion, Tomato.

  For the first time in his life, Dad had aunties, uncles, cousins. It was something I took for granted and never even thought about; I’d had all that extended family from the moment I was born. Barring the two years aged from zero to two, Dad hadn’t.

  A few relatives, Kirsten, Federico and Margo, had also made their way from Nuremberg, almost two hours away. That sounded like a bit of an effort, but I guess their thinking would have been that Dad and I had put in twenty-four hours of pain to make it there, so a drive down the highway wasn’t a huge ask.

  Instantly the talk turned to how much Thomas looked like his parents, Dad quietly relishing his chance to be the centre of attention. Their English was amazing, except for Herbert, the family patriarch who looked as though he’d survived the war. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to be precise. He was an ancient man, prone to blurting out whatever he liked at volume. I wish I could have understood it; it had the cadence and strength of something particularly un-PC.

  Amongst themselves they would slip back into German, to quickly discuss a question that had been asked or to explain something to those with a weaker grasp of English.

  Then, from out of nowhere, Dad started conversing in German. My dad. Tommy! Two-muss! Tomato! He spoke German!

  I knew my mum was bilingual, because she spoke Greek with her parents. Though she didn’t grow up there, her parents kept speaking Greek when they arrived in Australia, and she’d learned it that way. Often my grandfather would say things to me in Greek, my blank face a solid indicator that I had no idea what he was on about.

  But Dad? A German word or phrase like ‘Achtung’ or ‘schnell, schnell’ might be haphazardly tossed about during our childhood, but as we quickly learned they were mostly things he’d picked up from Hogan’s Heroes. But presented with the opportunity to join in a conversation, it came back to him. It was probably fifty years or more since it had been required, so he wasn’t fluent or expansive, but as long as the conversations weren’t held at any great speed, he understood enough to translate.

  I needed to know what else he was hiding. Creative dance? A love of poetry? The ability to watch a reality TV show without saying ‘this is bullshit!’? He really was an enigma.

  Once Dad’s German-speaking abilities were established, the chats slipped into long exchanges I couldn’t understand. I had to wait until there was a natural break before someone would translate it all for me. Turned out Frau Wilhelm from number seventy-three was having trouble with people parking on her nature strip again.

  While we were there, Dad took the opportunity to call home and wish Mum a happy birthday, using all his inner strength to keep it from her that he’d sent a card. He was as excited as a proud child about to give his dad a cricket book for his birthday.

  We had arrived at around 4 o’clock on a drizzly October afternoon and as the chat hummed along it wasn’t long before the sky darkened, heading towards night. Yet as we sat in growing dimness in the dining area, the lights were still to be turned on. It wasn’t dark, but if you were driving you’d strongly consider turning your headlights on. Reading would have been a struggle.

  I wasn’t alone in that thinking either, Dad’s eyes connecting with mine in the near darkness, letting me know he thought this was pretty strange as well. I wasn’t sure if this behaviour had been carried over from the blackouts during the war (habits can be hard to break), but before long it was dark enough that if I’d owned night-vision goggles I’d have put them on to safely pour a cup of tea without scalding myself.
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  There was a lamp next to me. Above the table hung a seventies brown-plastic light fixture. They were clearly aware of lighting. I doubted they usually went to bed when the sun disappeared, only staying up after dark when Australians were visiting.

  Fortunately, by the time the photos came out, someone had stumbled their way through the pitch-black and found a light switch.

  The live Ancestry.com session that followed really drew Dad in, discovering so much about his mum as a young woman. He was seeing new photos of her and asking questions he’d never been able to. It was a lifetime of stories in one night, Dad finding out about his mum skipping school to go on picnics in the park and driving her friends to dance halls even though she didn’t have a licence. Things his mum probably didn’t think were memorable or noteworthy enough to convey to Dad, but he might’ve heard about if he’d had blood relatives around to fill in the blanks.

  When I was younger I loved hearing from aunts and uncles about naughty things my mum had done when she was a kid, and Dad revelled in hearing this stuff about his mum for the first time. I felt for him, realising that a part of him must’ve always hurt, never having the opportunity for extended family when it was happening all around him for his kids and his wife.

  Not that he’d ever admit to it, but for the first time I saw in Dad someone who did care about family, and in particular his mother and where she came from. He’d spent as long as I could remember walking around with a tough exterior, impervious to feelings, but at that moment he couldn’t hide it. And what I liked the most was that he didn’t try.

  Darkness came eventually, but this time it wasn’t lighting based. I should have known it would be impossible to have a few generations of Germans talking about the past without there being a skeleton in the closet. Or quite a few skeletons, as it turned out. Without any sense of shame it was revealed that on my grandmother’s side a number of family members had fought for the German army in the first and second world wars, including my great-grandfather. I don’t want to turn this book into an encyclopaedia, but for context, it’s important to know that from the early 1900s up until around 1945 the Germans were not known as the greatest bunch of people on the planet.

  Genealogy websites always boast about the family history they can uncover, so people can bore everyone to death with stories of ‘Uncle Finbar, who worked the docks in County Galway, made his way to Australia after thirty-two of his brothers died in a potato avalanche.’ They never came back saying, ‘Aah . . . yeah . . . your grandfather was . . . in the German army in World War Two! Sorry! You asked!’

  Hearing about my great-grandfather shook me; I hadn’t expected that, and it took some of the shine off the fun night we’d been having. It must have been even worse for Dad, since he was a generation closer to it than me. No one wants a recent dark past. If some relative happened to go on a rampage during the crusades, well, that’s far enough back that it almost sounds like a footy-trip anecdote (with a few more sieges). What I’d heard was recent history and still affected the present day.

  I knew I’d have to sit with the information a few days, until I could digest it and let the feelings of dismay pass. I couldn’t change what had happened. I took comfort in the knowledge that at least Mum’s side of the family wasn’t like that; from all reports Great-Grandpa Pol Pot had been a really nice guy.

  We said goodbye, Dad promising to keep in touch with his new-found family. He seemed happy to have finally been to a family function that was actually his family and not in-laws.

  On our last day in Munich, Markus and Hans took us for a traditional Bavarian breakfast: a meal of sausages, soft pretzels and beer. Dad and I were bemused by the beer. It would never work back home, because Australians can’t be trusted and everyone would be blind by lunchtime. Dad couldn’t have been more excited though, taking to the idea like someone who loves beer being offered it at breakfast.

  Dad seemed genuinely happy. He’d met family, found out more about his mum, had beer for brekky and generally enjoyed Munich, even though the bin night puzzle was never solved.

  We finished up with Markus and Hans, saying goodbye and a heartfelt thanks to our fantastic and helpful hosts, safe in the knowledge that even though we’d spent so much time together over these last few days we’d probably never see them again.

  Our next destination was Bamberg, three hours north of Munich, the town where Dad was born. Not that he remembered living there, but it felt right to at least spend a night or two there on our way through to Berlin. Having seen how he’d reacted to meeting his relatives, I was now curious to see Dad’s response to checking out where he came from. Before, I would have predicted it to be a stonewall of indifference, but now I thought he might be pushed into an over the top emotional display. Like a shrug, or an affirmative nod.

  As we set off to hire a car for our drive to Bamberg, I noticed Dad was walking considerably slower than previous days and started looking sore. More to the point, he started to sound sore. He did his best to push on without complaint, which didn’t mean he was silent; instead of talking, I could hear involuntary grunts, moans and mutterings under his breath, which told me he was in trouble. I offered to stop, but he turned me down as that would be a sign of weakness, something he’s dead against. Every time I suggested we take a breather he responded with, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine! Nothing wrong here!’ The ‘here’ being said with as much strain as if he was in the middle of throwing a 30-kilo shotput.

  Despite his denials, walking with a gait like a baby giraffe was proof he wasn’t fine at all. His tactic of pretending to window shop – something he would never do back home – became more frequent. His critical error was stopping before noticing what type of shop it was, meaning his reasons for the breaks were becoming wilder. I became pretty suspicious when he loitered outside a wig shop, asking, ‘How do you reckon I’d look in one of those?’

  The constant pausing didn’t worry me, but I was frustrated by the outlandish excuses he was concocting. For a man with no interest in architecture he suddenly wanted to admire every building in Munich, big and small. If he admitted he was hurting then we could both do something about it. I was more than happy to stop the moment he called for a rest. But that wasn’t Dad’s style. He came from an era of ‘deal with it and move on’. His own father, Roland, had walked out on the family when Dad was six years old and, as far as I could tell, while Dad never let it go – he was determined to be a better father to his own kids – he never dwelled on it. I didn’t hear him talk about his father until I was in my teens, when he’d say he didn’t allow his dad’s departure to cause him any lingering concern because, ‘What else could I do?’

  It’s that same attitude that meant Dad never went to the doctor. Once, he broke his wrist changing the tyre on his truck. Most people, faced with a seized wheel nut that won’t budge, might use a hammer to hit the tyre lever and exert some extra force to release the nut. Not Dad – he used his hand. Which, in turn, broke his wrist.

  The break was only discovered after almost a week of constant pain, not at all helped by the fact it was his left hand and his truck is a manual, meaning every gear change was causing him incredible pain. He’d tried to strap his wrist to ease the pain, but somehow his remedy of a bandage with rubber bands around it didn’t solve the problem. Rubber bands. Because even though he’d wrapped his wrist in a bandage from the chemist, his expert mind figured a bit of extra stability in the form of rubber bands would do the trick. I’m not sure where he got that idea from; perhaps he asked one of the doctors at Officeworks.

  Eventually he did end up at the doctor, who diagnosed the break and ordered surgery. He now lives his life pain and rubber-band free.

  It’s just the way he saw life. It wasn’t okay to complain. RUOK Day wouldn’t sit well with him. In his day men didn’t talk about their feelings or show any form of pain, physical or emotional. He’d be more of an advocate for UROK Day, where people around the country get together to be told to ‘shut up and get on with
it’.

  He wasn’t a fan of the sook. When I retired hurt in under-12s cricket after copping a ball to the thigh and walking off the ground in tears, unable to carry on, I knew he was disappointed. What he didn’t know was that it was part of my master plan to wait out the good bowlers and come back on to the ground when the chumps were bowling. Thus making me look like a hero who’d returned from death’s clubroom door to post a decent, against-all-odds innings. But thinking back to that incident, I can understand Dad’s perspective. I could have carried on, but chose the easy path.

  He took things too far the other way. Just because you shouldn’t sook doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say something if you are genuinely hurting. I had made a point of slowing down our walking pace through Munich after overhearing him on the phone with Mum at our relatives’ house. He told her I walked really fast. I wished he’d said it to me instead of her, so that I could’ve adjusted my speed earlier, rather than having to eavesdrop to find out what was really going on. But even my slower speeds were still causing him problems.

  I would admit I did walk fast, but that was entirely down to one person: him. Wherever we went as kids I basically had to maintain a quick jog to keep up, constantly hearing ‘hurry up!’ over my heavy breathing. Now the tables had turned and suddenly he wasn’t such a fan.

  Hurriedly walking as though a street-market meat stick was rapidly passing through my digestive system wasn’t the only trait I’d picked up from Dad. He had a sense of urgency in everything he did, which, against all my better judgement, became a part of my life too.

  He instilled in me the attribute of always being early, which in and of itself is not bad, but Dad took it to the extreme. When I was a teen he’d be content to sit in the car for hours before I needed to be picked up from whichever event he’d dropped me off at. He’d sit there like he was on a stake-out, doing the crossword and probably counting how many people went to the bathroom.