Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: brother

  • the boast of Christmas past

    Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, the family symbolised most of what I’ve longed for all my life – the continuity and cosiness of grandmother living upstairs and now sleeping in the graveyard, the grooming visits, where we trimmed her candles and scattered flowers for her; the dog racing joyously through unbroken snow; the stacks of firewood and the window dense with flickering lights.

    I felt so welcomed the very first year, when he and I had known each other only six months; his mother was kind and his father jovial yet somehow forbidding and she had saved for me the tree to decorate, “because you are an artist.” I persuaded him to go down there early in the season so we could hang out in his family, since mine is so fraught; and on December 9, 2012, four years ago today, we woke up at the other end of our long train ride and opened the door on a perfect world. Here is what I wrote:

    Waking up in a tiny German village. It has snowed and the snow extends away across the fields. The woods stand shoulder to shoulder up the hill. Opening the door I can hear church bells howling like dogs, everything is beautiful because everything is covered in snow, a white democracy. The phrase forms in my mind and a series of sour images ensues: what is white about a democracy? Everything in Germany is tinctured with its history, the way everything in Australia cries out black stories. Nonetheless this fairytale landscape has a hold of my mind, I feel relaxed and browsing, last night by the candleglow Christmas market I found a bookshop displaying eleven different editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm in its front window. Tiny sparrows dart at the small wooden house outside pecking at seeds. A fierce wind has sprung up from, apparently, the Arctic Circle and I close the door thankfully. Good morning, winter world.

    Then last year, a huge family shindig. I should put ‘family’ in inverted commas because part of the substance of the fight – the potatoes perhaps, if not the meat – was that I was not part of the family, being a newcomer; therefore he had no right to bring me into important family discussions.

    This important family discussion was about money, aren’t they all. Previous family visits had been laidback, shambolic, tilted round long evening board games and wine. Now something was brewing, but I couldn’t work out what. All week we’d been trying to work out why everybody seemed so tense. Then January second I stumbled out of bed and down the dark hallway to find my honey and his father locked in fiery argument.

    I sat down and took my partner’s hand. To be locked inside a fire is grievous indeed. I had never heard this family shouting before, though the father’s a bit of a bully: our very first visit I had called him out on his treatment of his son, when the man whistled for him to bring something; He’s not a dog, I said, and the old man said: Doch. (“Au contraire.”) This visit he had been mocking us for our failure to produce a child; the sister, a thistly blonde, was swollen with her third and we had lost our baby and been unable, thus far, to bring forth a living sibling. The proud grandfather sat with his injured foot up on an ottoman, making my partner’s dog beg for walnuts; his son said, please don’t spoil my dog, it is I who will have to live with him, and the father said: “Well. If I had a grandchild, I would be spoiling the child. But as there is no grandchild…”

    These coarse country people occur in my family as well. Ours also drink too much and hoard things and are suspicious of fresh food. All week we had been walking in on whispered conferences which urgently suspended and then remained hanging in the air, swinging like baubles. Now the underwater fire had burst forth. It was a question of inheritance. They had cooked up an arrangement which seemed to me bitterly unfair as well as financially unwise, and I said so.

    My own family finds me outspoken, too. It inconveniences them to the point of injury. When I flew home for my father’s funeral and suggested, in sentences very tentative and clothed in sticky tact, a less sentimental poem for the ceremony, my brother said flatly, “That’s not open for discussion, Cathoel.” I said, “But – ” and he ranted, “See! this is why I was saying it would be better if you didn’t come back – you’re just this person who comes in and changes everything.”

    “You don’t belong in this family,” he had also said, on another occasion, and when I retailed this story after Dad’s funeral to my friend she said, bracingly, “This is perfectly true, of course. The only difference is, he doesn’t realise that it’s a compliment.”

    “She doesn’t belong in this discussion,” the father said now: “because you two are not properly married.” Well, I told him, wounded and enraged. When your daughter got married – it was on two days’ notice and in the town hall, because they’d worked out at the last minute they would save eight thousand euros in tax by becoming officially a couple – I had to borrow a set of unwashed clothes from the bride, else I’d have had to go along in my overalls. It wasn’t exactly love’s young dream.

    Well, but you have no children, he blustered, so you don’t really belong. And thus silenced me with pain.

    I told him some home truths and he told me to shut up. We had never spoken to each other like this before. I got louder. So did the dad, but I suspect everyone is so used to his roaring and his barked commands that they barely noticed. Afterwards I was accused of having said things that were beyond the reach of my imperfect German vocabulary. I reminded the father that he had told me several times to halt den Schnabel, hold your muzzle. They were so outraged at my insurrection “under my roof, to me, as host! in my Own Home!” that they had no room left over to contemplate what might be due to a guest, a vulnerable guest trying to celebrate their daughter’s umpteenth glowing pregnancy, a person separated from her own family and far from home. When I first saw the daughter, clomping on her sore ankles and complaining about the weight, I had followed her outside and asked that we could hug each other. “I’m so happy for you. It’s just painful for me, kind of, because we tried so hard – but I’m happy for you. I just wanted to give you a hug, you and your belly, and try to get myself used to it.” She embraced me with tears in her eyes. Now all of that was forgotten. I had called the messy patriarch of this outlander tribe a bully, to his face. I had said, inspired by rage and a kind of foaming disgust at his harassment and meanness, Your son – is a real man. He has manhood. I have seen him do terrible things and then hold himself to account. I’ve seen him struggling to learn and to make changes in himself. You should respect him. You should treat him with respect.

    I think we can’t bear when a woman speaks out. When a woman questions things. How dare she, how could she, and who does she think she is. The day after the fight we caught the train home to Berlin. I went up to the father, sitting at the table with his arms folded, and put out my hand. After a moment, he took it. I said, thank you for your hospitality and for having us in your home. The next morning a phone call. And the word, Hausverbot. This means, I forbid you my house. It is kind of a ‘don’t ever darken my door.’ In German, my partner said, very serious. You would give Hausverbot to a repeatedly violent pub guest who started a knife fight and stabbed somebody. Or to someone who’d been stealing in your store.

    The son, of course (they assured him) was welcome. But do not bring that woman under our roof. I spent January dissolved in tears, before distaste began to displace the other pain. You don’t belong in this family. All year long the wound festered. My father died and I went home. I confided how I was dreading this Christmas, worse than all the Christmases before. Afterwards my mother, in a bout of generosity, offered to send us both to Morocco for a holiday to replace the painful season. In an ancient Islamic city we could forget about the festivities we’d not share. We could put aside the sore points like the pregnant sister who didn’t bother giving either of us a gift, and whose kangaroo skin rug we had lingered over for an hour in the ugg boots store, wanting to bring her something luscious and Australian and Scandinavian for her comfy home, stroking every skin to find which was the softest. They are soft like the tender belly fur of a little cat. A day later, when all the piles of gifts had been opened and I was putting mine away, I asked her: hey what did you give me? I can’t seem to find it. Oh, she said – I just never thought of it. This hurt, and I told her so; not that she has to give a gift, but that she didn’t think. Now somehow this long-ago frisson of discomfort has been revived and painted glossy and put in the front window. We, who brought an extravagant gift we could ill afford, are designated materialistic, and grasping. My outspokenness is insufferable. My partner is greedy, because he feels sad and hurt at being all but cut out of his parents’ will. Last week the father, tricked past his pride by the wife who pretended his son had called first, finally rang. “I lift the Hausverbot,” he said, grandly. “You are very welcome and I hope you’ll come to us. But please don’t come to Christmas – your sister and her husband wouldn’t like it.”

  • dead man sleepwalking

    In this house of illness and pain I get lonely. Everyone is in bed by eight o’clock and the long night stretches ahead. Tonight I can hear the rain plinking on the skylight which reminds me of the sound of rain on a tin roof, the sound of my childhood. I am tired. My father can only take soft, resistless things. His swallowing or as the Greek carer calls it “his slow” is very deteriorated. Every day there are two sets of meals to make. I’ve been searching out the kinds of foods he can slow and which my mother and I can also eat with him, not so much to save the work as to include him and to try and beckon him somewhat out of the twilight in which he is living.

    When you’re in hospital, or in my father’s case living in a hospital bed in his own bedroom and then in a padded hospital lounge chair all day, meals are the highlight of the day. The clinking of the trays along the corridor, the slowly approaching voices. If you can’t look forward to that, what is there to look forward to? pain and dosings, people who pull you about and speak in a singsong tone, and death.

    There is a lot of work to do, and a lot of cleaning up afterwards. It’s like having children but sadly, I have been spared that joy. I have become preoccupied with brewing everything from scratch and am making rich bone broths on beef neck and chicken frames, slow-cooked casseroles in which the meat dissolves into tenderness, a rich bolognese which simmered on the stovetop for three hours until it was silken and plump. I offer little trays: clumps of his favourite soft cheeses and soft smoked oysters, and Dad might manage a teaspoonful before he turns his face away. The next day he will have more energy, he seems brighter, so the effort feels worth it.

    The carer has told me, “I cannot help my mother, I cannot help my father – but I can do this.” She looks after my father as though she loves him, standing ready with the clotted tissues for the food that he has held in his mouth for a quarter of an hour, refusing to swallow. She says, “You want to slow? Try to slow it. You can’t slow? Ok, then split it. Split!” And my father spits and she wipes his mouth for the four hundredth time.

    I had to do this today and I did it as well as I could. My brother had entered the bedroom and stood covering his eyes while I held out the tissue to Dad and then, behind Dad’s back so as not to hurt him, indulged the paroxysm which instinctively clutched my whole body. It’s not his fault and I’m not at all disgusted with him, I love him. It’s just a bodily reflex. The sensation of hot liquid coming out of my father’s mouth is too much for me. My mother lying up against her pillows announced, again, “Oh! you would have made a terrible nurse.” I have no doubt this is true. She gestured towards my brother, standing just inside the doorway so as not to infect Dad with his cold. She asked the invisible audience who accompanied our childhoods, “How did I end up producing two such lily-livered cowards?”

    My brother’s late appearance, two weeks into my short visit, is on account of the feud he and his wife have had with me, kept up for more than six years now; I threw a plate and they cannot forgive me. This was in May 2010. We had a family dinner at which my brother was tired and so stressed that he roared at his kid. The boy was two and I have seen him four times since. My brother is huge and his roar made us all jump. I said, “You know – I’m not sure you need to use quite that much volume.”

    There is dispute over what happened next. Brother says he said, We’re not interested in your parenting advice. My memory of it is: You don’t have kids so we’re not interested in your opinion. The cruelty of this when he knew, they all knew, they’ve all known, how desperately, dearly, deeply, strongly I yearned and tried to have children of my own, cut me like a clamshell across the throat. I can feel its ache now, as I write about it.

    The feeling of having been excluded, after a lifetime of being told by this family and this same brother I was over-emotional and over-sensitive, that I had “such an imagination” and thus had constructed most of the abusive events which dotted our historical landscape like felled trees, of being told that my opinion didn’t matter and my experiences had never existed, created a pain that felt intolerable in my body. I grabbed my plate of Thai takeaway and hurled it to the floor. As it left my hands all of the anger left my body and I thought with great distinctness, “Oh, you idiot. You are never going to hear the end of this.” And as so rarely, I was right.

    Plategate, a friend called it over dinner this week. She was joking that if I ever see my estranged sister-in-law again I should monitor our conversation for imagined slights. I should say, in a dark, gormless brute’s voice, “Oi, wotchit. Don’t you be sayin’ that, or I’ll killya. I’ll killya with this… plate!” She mimed drawing a tiny side plate out of her breast pocket and we folded up with laughter. Plategate changed our whole terrain and I have not been forgiven by my brother and his wife. She still keeps herself and her children apart from me on the grounds that I am dangerous, terrifying, violent. This accusation wounds me because it sits next to the hidden violence of my mother, who suffers some kind of condition that leads her to build towering rages which moments later in the wreckage she is unable to remember. All my life I have had a bone-loosening fear of that terrorising rage. The destructive, the lasting bolts she hurls. The silence afterwards, broken by my father saying, “Well, I was sitting right here, and I didn’t hear her say anything like that.” There have been times when I found no one looking back out of her eyes, they were avid like a bird’s, there was no one to reason or plead with. Very few people outside the family have witnessed this phenomenon and it was a great relief to me each time when someone did.

    My brother meanwhile has an explanation that ties everything in a bundle. There must be something wrong with me. In our twenties he told me there was something “wrong with your basic personality” and that was why I kept choosing unkind men. “You cling to these imaginary or exaggerated events because they give you an explanation for why your life hasn’t been all it could have been.” He has told me that as a child I was so irritating that our mother had no choice but to get angry with me. And once, perhaps a decade back, in a gentler mood he said, “I think you’ve just never experienced unconditional love. I think Mum and Dad didn’t know how to love you.” This struck me as a shaft of light between the trees and I bounded upstairs to ask Dad. This was after Dad’s stroke but before the cancer and he was lying in his daytime cane lounge chair, gazing out into the trees. “Dad,” I said, “Dad!”

    My father turned his head slowly. “What?”

    I was so excited I was hopping from foot to foot. “Dad, would you say your love for me was… unconditional?”

    “Oh, yes, pet,” he said. “Largely.” He looked startled when I started to laugh merrily.

    To be difficult to love is the fate of some of us. Of most of us, maybe, when we really get close to one another. Mopping up after another meagre meal which my father has picked at and spat out, passing the carer on the stairs as she carries him his fourth glass of cold milk for the night to make up for all the meals he wasn’t able to manage, I think about this. To love one another in all our difficultness is perhaps the most exacting grace of all: it is the fur in our mange, it’s the comfort in our cave; that’s just nature of love, it’s the manner of the beast.

  • happens so fast

    Mum’s in hospital. Dad’s in hospital. Both in the same hospital and admitted on the same night. He has pneumonia, we think, and they’re waiting for the results of the PSA test on his prostate cancer this morning. If he has a heart attack, he told the doctor, he does not want to be revived. My mother ten minutes after Dad was carted off in the ambulance went downstairs to water the garden, tripped over her own pants leg, and broke her hip. My brother was trying to tend to both of them while they were two beds apart on the emergency ward and when Mum was wheeled off for her Xray, and Dad was wheeled up to the ward, he asked as they passed the doors of the Xray department, can’t we just open the door a crack? And let them say hello to each other.

    The door was opened. They got to see each other and wish each other good luck. Dad’s doctor was doubtful he would make it through the night. Describing my parents saying hello through the Xray department door my brother broke down and sobbed. He kept saying, We need to talk about this as a family, we’re not ready to say goodbye yet! I said, this is very hard what you are doing. I wish I could be there to support you, and them. I’ve been tormented since I heard by the thought of them both being in such pain, and under the same roof, but separated. I said, even though it hurts us, I think it’s Dad’s own decision. It is his life and no one can keep him here if he is suffering. I described my friend who died last month, of euthanasia, when her quality of life became unbearable. Yes, said my brother very slowly. I know it might be very hard for you to do I said, and it’s asking a lot. But if you were able to find it in yourself – when Dad is awake and alert – to provide him with a calm enough conversational space so that he can clearly, plainly express his own wishes for his fate: I think it would be a truly loving service you could offer him. My brother said, I think he’ll want to hang on, for Mum. May 28th will be their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’d imagined that I was the only one who wouldn’t be there, for that.