Paris and Other Disappointments

by Adam Rozenbachs

  By this stage Dad was about 4 metres away, the distance growing, but if he’d tried hard enough he could have hassled his way back through the crowd. One advantage to the Saturday visit was a lot of the visitors were kids, who could be easily be moved past (shoved out of the way).

  Dad didn’t bother with any of that. He waved me off with a, ‘Nah, it’s alright. I’ve seen it on tele.’

  Zen is not a word anyone has ever associated with me. I regularly throw golf clubs (on the course; I’m not a psycho tossing four irons in the street). As a kid I was hosed down by Mum after disagreeing with my brother over an LBW decision a little too passionately while playing backyard cricket. All my life I had allowed frustrating moments to get the better of me.

  In that moment at Checkpoint Charlie, every fibre of my being wanted that. Dad waving off the car and walking away churned my insides. I was ready to snap.

  As I moved past (shoved aside) the children in my way to catch up with Dad, I wondered why we were even at Checkpoint Charlie. If he couldn’t be bothered looking at anything he’d already seen on television, then I struggled to see why we’d made the effort of coming halfway around the world. We could have watched a Europe on DVD box set.

  As a child, if I’d said I wanted to see something and then waved it off when we got there, Dad would never have let me get away with it. He would have made me stand in front of that East German car until I knew the pressure of each individual tyre. I grew up under a regime of ‘enjoy it, or else!’, the best method of education.

  Not for the first time, I wondered how other people managed to travel with their parents. My friend Jean-Paul travelled to Tokyo with his Dad and, as far as I could tell, they seemed to enjoy themselves. When the sumo wrestlers tossed the salt onto the mat before a fight, I don’t believe his dad leaned in and asked, ‘I wonder who cleans that?’

  A colleague of mine drove all the way from Mongolia to Paris with his son, and I still can’t work out how that was achieved without ending in a murder–suicide somewhere in Siberia.

  I was being as flexible as I could, trying not to force Dad to do too much against his will, but it wasn’t really working out. We’d been spending far too much time together – the only breaks I got were sleep, going for a run or to the gym, or taking a three-hour shower – but I didn’t really have any other option. If I did my own thing then he’d simply stay in the apartment by himself, and I’d feel guilty for abandoning him. I was in a no-win situation, too guilty to take a break but desperately needing one.

  The only way I managed all this was thanks to the ultimate ace up my sleeve: I’d been to Europe before. Instead of losing my mind and letting Dad know in no uncertain terms what I thought of his indifference, I managed to hold it all in by thinking, ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve seen this. Don’t let it get to you.’

  So to anyone considering travelling with a parent, my tip for maintaining a reasonable level of sanity (not all, but some) is to complete the exact same trip three months before by yourself. It will be an expensive way to go about it, but in the long run you’ll save money on therapy.

  I should have known Dad wasn’t genuinely enthusiastic about the car. The only time he gets excited about anything is when there’s a large portion of food in the offing. Otherwise he has a resting heart rate of one.

  One day at Mum and Dad’s I wandered into Dad’s TV room, where I found a list in his handwriting. Curious, I started to read it, for a few seconds unsure what exactly I was looking at. About halfway down the list I worked out that they were film reviews. Dad had written them for movies my brother had downloaded for him, making it easier for Jason to properly curate the next batch.

  Last Cab to Darwin – not bad

  The Big Short – shit

  Trumbo – slow

  The Drop – slow/good

  Moonwalkers – crap

  Are You Here – crap/slow

  Automata – trash

  The Captive – slow/crap

  These are actual reviews of hundreds of people’s hard work summed up in one word, sometimes two, if extra detail might provide a better idea of the film. I imagine he stressed that Jason should avoid ‘slow/crap’ as best he could.

  I wasn’t familiar with any of these films, so couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of the reviews, but what I took from it was that I’m glad Dad doesn’t review comedy. That kind of brutal honesty would have comedians curled up in the corner, sobbing, devastated by a one-word summation: ‘shit’. When I’d been at the un-fun end of a bad review, I did my best to read between the lines in the search for a positive, or at least find a few words that could be used out of context to portray positivity. Even the world’s best spin doctor would struggle to come out a victor with nothing to work with except ‘shit’.

  After Checkpoint Charlie, we spent an hour at the Topography of Terror, an exhibition about the Nazis’ secret police forces, located on the former site of the SS and Gestapo headquarters. As if we hadn’t soaked up quite enough misery at Dachau and Checkpoint Charlie, the cruel history just kept coming, an old section of the Berlin Wall hosting the exhibits as you walked along. The horror was relentless.

  Keeping up his theme of understatement, Dad summed up the whole regime with, ‘Hitler was a real bastard.’ Though he’s normally described as a monster or paranoid schizophrenic (Hitler, not the old man), I couldn’t disagree with Dad’s take.

  It was Berlin where, for probably the first time ever, Dad and I went for a walk without a destination. For as long as we’d known each other, there was always a destination. To the MCG to watch a grand final, where I witnessed my first ever streaker. To the car after I’d broken my arm running from the ticket inspector at a train station, Dad wanting to be mad but holding back because he could see how much pain I was in. Back to bed as a seven-year-old after I woke up screaming during a night terror, him patting my back and soothing this crazed child who must’ve scared the hell out of everyone in the house. We’d walked together thousands of times. But always somewhere.

  No one back home would believe Dad and I were out . . . wandering. Like a happy couple content with nothing more than each other’s company. If I’d asked him to go for a walk back home he would’ve suspected a trap, too suspicious to say yes. But I figured I could give him a break from learning history against his will by ambling through the Tiergarten park at a pace so slow we looked like we were doing the mannequin challenge.

  The park is a massive expanse of lawns, meadows and forest, right in the heart of the city. As we strolled through this tranquil landscape, I was reminded that Dad is one of those people who think they’ll stop existing if they aren’t making noise. When we were in the car I could justifiably tell him to be quiet, under the pretence that our lives were at risk while I was driving on the wrong side of the road. But just walking around, I couldn’t claim anything was about safety, so was forced to hold my tongue as Dad pointed out unspectacular things that I could already see.

  ‘Ducks! Police! Tram!’ he’d exclaim, like an adult toddler.

  An adoddler. I was travelling with an adoddler.

  Outwardly I ignored it, reasoning with myself that it would be mean to tell him to be quiet with no excuse, but my mind was in overdrive. I realised I had seen this inane behaviour at home: when Mum informed me my brother was getting a pool installed at his house, Dad had helpfully added, ‘Swimming pool.’ It’s just that I wasn’t there enough to see how common it was.

  Pointing out things I could see wasn’t hurting anyone, so I had to ask myself, ‘Is it really such a big deal?’ The answer was yes. Yes, it was a big deal. It was doing my fucking head in.

  But I had a motive for keeping my cool regardless, going all the way back to when I was fourteen. It was 5.30 am on a cold July morning. I had snoozed my alarm for the second time, the heavy downpour having already woken me a good twenty minutes earlier. I knew I had to be up soon to do my newspaper round, but getting soaked doing it made it a tough sell.

  ‘Adam?�
�� It was Dad, whispering so as not to wake my brother.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Come on, get up. I’ll take you today.’

  Those words were like winning the lottery. Dad was going to drive me around on my paper round, saving me from drowning on my bike.

  Experience had taught me not just any rain got me that treatment. It had to be torrential enough to wake everyone during the night. A standard shower would’ve been seen as nothing more than an opportunity for me to harden up.

  I thanked Dad from the bottom of my heart (not out loud, of course). It was early. It was cold. It was wet. That was a trifecta of shit. I’d still get wet running from house to house, Dad rolling the papers up and handing them to me through the car window, but it would cut the time of the round in half. It also had the added bonus that we’d get to hang out together, without my brother and sister.

  I proudly took Dad on what I’d deemed the fastest route, trying to finish the job as quickly as possible so we could get back home for a coffee and a Milo (not in the same mug). That route included our street where, handing me a paper out of the window, Dad said, ‘Hang on a sec,’ and left it hanging in the rain. I stood there confused, not understanding why he was letting the paper get soaked. All was explained when he gestured with his eyes to the house we were at. We were at the house of a neighbour who was disliked because he acted like he owned the street, telling us off for kicking the footy on the street or when my brother’s mates would park out the front of his house, even though he had a driveway and only one car.

  A huge grin came over my face. This was an adult being shit to another adult! What a world! We both held the paper, like a baton in a relay race where the objective is to be a bit of an arsehole, until Dad deemed it sufficiently wet for this type of rain but not enough to get me in trouble. I delivered it, knowing the paper would have to be opened with an extremely deft touch or risk being ripped apart and rendered useless. I prayed for the latter of course.

  Being a kid, I took these kind of favours for granted. That was my right. And sure, maybe I took advantage of Dad’s generosity, spraying his bedroom window with the garden hose to trick him into thinking it was pouring with rain and getting up to help me. But what kid wouldn’t?

  But that’s the reason I kept my mouth shut when, in the Tiergarten, he loudly pointed out a squirrel.

  In isolation none of these incidents – if you could even call them that – were that bad, but they were death by a thousand cuts. If you wanted to update that torture, it would be modernised to ‘parents for a thousand hours’. It would be extremely effective.

  ‘Your punishment today is to be subjected to your father for one thousand hours.’

  ‘Please don’t. I beg of you.’

  ‘In a modern art gallery.’

  ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’

  Our choice for dinner was Metzer Eck, a family-run pub just up the road from our accommodation in Prenzlauer Berg. I decided we should eat there after its very traditional menu had grabbed my attention during a run earlier that day. The wood-panelled walls and fireplace gave it a nice cosy feeling as Dad grabbed a table in the corner, and I headed to the bar for another look at the menu. Traditional in Germany clearly meant potato-based, as almost every dish came with fried potatoes.

  I bought a couple of beers and sat down, asking what Dad wanted. I didn’t really catch what he said, as it was what he wasn’t ordering that I was interested in. I’d seen on the menu that homemade lard was offered as an appetiser. Normally pig fat wasn’t a reason I’d choose to dine anywhere, but for years Dad had regaled the family with stories about his favourite childhood treat: teddy bear biscuits with lard. Enthusiasm building, he would detail how they’d lather the sweet biscuits in lard, indulging in the oily pork combined with the sweetness of the biscuit. It was a treat brought over from Germany that, surprisingly, didn’t catch on.

  Even as a kid I should have been dubious. If he ate it as often as he claimed, he would have been dead of a heart attack at age nine.

  But now it was time for him to put his hog fat where his mouth was. After not hearing ‘lard’ in anything he’d said he was considering ordering, I pointed it out on the menu.

  Pretending to think about it, he answered, ‘Nah, don’t feel like it.’

  If I hadn’t eaten something I loved in forty years, I’d be out in the kitchen, helping plate up. We both knew he’d been called out, that his years of bragging had been brutally exposed. But I let it go, not wanting to embarrass him.

  I’d save that for when I was telling Mum about the trip.

  A week into our journey, Dad was starting to feel the monotony of travelling. Figuring out what to do, where to eat, how to get around, calculating exchange rates, waiting for things to open. Nothing was automatic, as simple as getting in his car and following a daily routine. Usually another tedious travel challenge is trying to work out which of your clothes you can wear again, but it wasn’t an issue as Dad had brought his full wardrobe.

  Plus, we were running out of things to say to each other, as became clear when Dad started repeating stories. About his trip to Germany. At one point I had to say, ‘You know the person in that story is me? And that it was two days ago?’ I was starting to get an appreciation of how difficult it would be for parents to keep a child occupied during school holidays.

  After the non-lardfest, we headed back to our place, where I checked my email. The day before I had asked our Airbnb host in Paris if our accommodation was still all good, only to get the confusing reply, ‘Which one?’

  I thought that was odd, wondering to myself, ‘How many do you have?’ I replied with the address for the apartment I’d booked and put the whole thing out of my mind, 100 per cent confident that absolutely no trouble could come from the fact that this person did not know which apartment we had booked.

  What I needed was space. I resolved to tell Dad that I’d head out once he fell asleep, which would hopefully lessen my guilt about leaving him alone. I was about to tell him my plans, but he’d already passed out on the couch. I would have liked to think the trip was tiring him out, but falling asleep after dinner was pretty standard.

  As I made my way onto the darkened streets of Berlin I realised that, for the first time on the trip, I would be alone for a whole evening. I liked Berlin; its mixture of old buildings and new, modern architecture made it feel very Melbourne. I felt safe, whether that was warranted or not. The city had a great energy as people enjoyed their Saturday night.

  As a fan of heavy metal music, I figured if was going to be in a bar where I didn’t speak the language, I might as well go somewhere where I’d enjoy the music. I ended up at Nuke Club, a metal nightclub a few train stations away. It was a nice escape to relax and not have to make small talk for a while. It was a fairly uneventful night, aside from hearing someone yell ‘NEIN! NEIN! NEIN!’ in an attempt to stop a Nazi skinhead from throwing a bottle of beer off the balcony where we stood. It didn’t work, the bottle landing on the crowd below. Of all the countries where I thought skinheads might have toned themselves down a bit it should have been this one, what with the whole losing the war thing.

  On my way to the club I had contemplated what I would do if I met a nice Fräulein. I didn’t think I could stay at someone else’s place, because Dad would have been trapped; he could have left the apartment on his own, but I knew he would have stayed until I returned. I figured if I met a girl I would sneak her into my bedroom and try not to wake Dad by having very quiet sex. Which is a difficult thing to do, mainly because I’m very good at it.

  The loud music, darkness and language barrier in the club took care of that dilemma anyway. I made absolutely no noise as I went to bed by myself.

  The next morning, as we readied ourselves to head to the airport for our Paris flight, I checked my email one last time before we got going. We’d had a reply from the archives office in Bamberg.

  Dear Mr Rozenbachs!

  When you visited Bamberg, you spoke to us abo
ut your ancestor Hans Thomas Krug (and his wife Lydia) and you gave us the information, that he served in WW I and both lived in the city of Bamberg.

  We now checked all our files and repositories, but we could not find a person of that name. We therefore assume, that Hans Thomas Krug did not live in the city of Bamberg, but probably in the county of Bamberg, i.e. in one of the villages around. Unfortunately the municipal archives do not have any documents and information of people outside the city.

  But maybe you can provide us with more information on Hans Thomas Krug (registration form, document of baptism or similar), which show, that he lived in Bamberg. In this case we could try to do further research on him.

  Respectfully

  Robert Zink

  Already struggling with the strain of the trip, such disappointing news was probably not what Dad needed as he prepared to leave Germany for the final time. Again.

  PARIS

  Arriving in Paris blew Dad’s mind. Just not in the way I’d hoped.

  On the crowded train from Orly airport to the centre of Paris, I didn’t notice he’d gone quiet. I missed it because I was concentrating intently on getting us to the right Metro station. Alarm bells should have been ringing though, because there were hundreds of things he could have pointed out, like ‘policeman with machine gun’, yet he was staying uncharacteristically silent.

  I thought I understood his response. The first time I saw cops with machine guns, on a train from Berlin to Prague, I was shocked too. It’s such a heavy-handed display, usually reserved for the military or anyone in America.