WHAT A PERFECT PLACE
Why is this home?
Travellers know all the confusion of the human condition. They all share travelling puzzlement and anxiety.
Some have strayed across not just geographical boundaries but ethical and sexual one too. Hope steers them and love sustains them, although it can become fraught.
Before we finished our European holiday, my father was experiencing stomach pain. The doctor in Rome wanted to put him in hospital for tests....
but all arrangements had been made for us to leave. I went back to Australia and my father back to Canada.
An operation to remove 80 per cent of my father's stomach was performed within the weeks.
He wrote to me later: 'After eight wonderful months spent in my peaceful retreat, I began to deteriorate, bring the kids, come to visit me...'
And we did...we loved Canada but as winter approached we longed for our warm shores.
"On the road again," he sang when we took him to the airport to fly with us to Australia for change. He was always on the road, even sitting home...wherever his home was...
searching for spiritual and intellectual answers to life's mysteries.
Understandably perhaps, he found beauty in corners of Thailand, on our stop over as well as in Australia that its natives never see.
His naive gaze shed clear light on the good and bad that Australia has to offer one more enigmatic arrival on our shores.
Taken for a drive through the city's western suburbs he marveled at the rooftops stars and flowers and waterfalls of ligtht, the illuminated evening sky above the dark ocean...
He loved the idea that a backyard is a place of refuge, a quiet place for contemplation, hidden from the outside world. The sound of a gentle fountain delivering that essential thread of life in the dry land - water to much-loved trees.
"It's all about simplicity, this is all the lifelong refugee like me needs at the end of his life," he said to me.
We have been sitting outside trendy cafe in East Perth. A small boat moves over the tranquil waters of nearby Claisebrook Cove.
Some passers-by seem more intent on the screens of their mobiles than enjoying the surroundings.
"You can have all the paraphernalia of modern life -i-pads, mobile phones, but you still don't connect with people if you don't listen the them and share your life with them." He murmured watching them.
Our conversation wanders down various parts, suddenly we are at ease talking about the weighty subjects of life and death.
"You know, our European holiday last year helped me to realise what's actually important in life, and what's not."
He suddenly looked at me: " And to remind me of my own mortality."
"I woke up this morning in this beautifully strange land with the sudden realisation I am going to die soon."
I shook my head and tried hard to smile, but he patted my hand reassuringly: "I know, it's a really confronting thing, well, if you are lucky you get old, and I am the lucky one...
the lucky refugee who has been, for so long denying the passing of time."
I looked at the peaceful bay and nodded solemnly: "I think what is true about life ending, it gives life its strength and beauty in knowing that it does end."
He paused to reflect: "I know when I die there will be a selfish part of you thinking: 'this is going to happen to me one day', it has happened to me as well with my father...
the trouble is, we spend most of our time thinking that's never going to happen to anybody, let alone ourselves."
My father died few days after that. Coming back to the place of our last conversation I have realised my father was so far ahead of me....
his inner child still inside him...the only words he wanted to be put on his grave describes him fully: 'The world first lucky refugee'.
he was always taking photos and looking at everything intensely. But I realise now, when I think of him, that I have started doing that too.
Really seeing the beauty in things.
"More boat people sent home," I read loudly from the newspaper: "The Federal Government has sent more Sri Lankan refugees home as two new boats arrived in Australian waters."
"So what, who cares?" replied my teenager's son.
"I do," I said quietly knowing then once the pimples on his face will be not the only thing occupying his mind, he will care too, being the grandson of the world first lucky refugee.
to rekindle what was lost
estranged
familial bonds
two weeks
might seem long
to spend with my father
who left our family
before I could walk or talk,
flying away from the Eastern Europe
to the Western democratic part of the world.
Cruising beautiful European waterways
there is nowhere else
I want to be,
being with my father,
to see where he lived as an young man
while I was growing up
dreaming to meet him one day,
looking across the border
lined with barbed fence
over the heads of armed soldiers
with their nasty guns pointed at me...
Upon arriving in Paris
we hit the ground running
no time for jet lag
there are three exhilarating days
to be spent absorbing
the City of Love and Lights
the breezy boulevards
of ornate buildings
erected centuries ago
as legacies to kings and emperors
I love the quiant artistic streets
of Montmartre
My father the famous landmarks
the Arc de Triomphe
where he begged for food
so many years back
and of course the Eiffel Tower
where the night-time views
are just magical,
"See that tiny appartment,
one old French lady lived there,
who took me in
to help her with repairs."
As we travel north
by coach to Amsterdam
observing the contrast
of enormous wind propellers
dwarfing rustic church spires
and the bullet train
flying through fields
where cows have grazed
for hundred of years:
"Your Great grand father was fighting here,
more than 94 years ago
and I tried my luck,
here,
over 30 years back."
We reached the tolerant city
of drugs and gay marriages,
the red light district's maze of narrow
cobblestoned streets
and canals
on a Friday night
mingling with hundreds of raucously
intoxicated tourists,
grey figures of migrants
and unnoticable refugees,
hanging around bars
and coffee shops
that don't sell coffee,
my father smiles,
remembering the time here
he worked for cash
repairing roofs on some of them.
As we cruise out of Amsterdam
on our 'Amadeus Briliant'
passengers from every part of the world
look out of the full-length windows
the majority of them
have not been in Europe
before
it is strange to see your native continent
from their point of view.
What are we doing here,
you may ask,
it was my father's idea
to meet somewhere between,
each of us living
on the other side of the world,
cruising the European waterways,
the everyday sights
of a family picknicking next to
their family bicycle
may bring us closer
to our own family roots.
A fisherman's net stretching
into the still water
and the signs
indicating distance from the Rhine's source
remind my father
the time he lived in Cologne and Koblenz,
he explains me the long history
of settlement along the river,
dating back to Roman and Celtic times.
I view the towering castles
of medieval villages
on both sides
constructed during the 11th century
to protect the monasteries
many were plundered
by the conquering
French armies,
they have been lovingly restored
by the German people
over the past 200 years,
and refugees just like my father
were recruited to paint,
to repair,
to maintain it nowadays.
My Father and me
visit the charming walled city of Rothenburg,
perched high on the hill above the Tauber Valley.
He tells me about his favourite pub
where he used to enjoy Bavarian beer
and buys me 'schneeballen'.
Walking within the medieval walls
we taste the deep-fried pastry,
his lips covered with sugar
and chocolate glaze
and yet his eyes do not smile,
"Even born nomads,
eventually weary of the road,
should I have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"
Walking uneasy
on the former nazi
rally ground
in Nuremberg
the immense proportions of the buildings
make us feel so unsignificant.
Having lived through World War II
as a child
my father has no interest
in entering an eerie museum
and his spirit is uplifted
only after meandering down
the beautiful Danube Gorge
the river of our hometown.
Arriving at the impressive
Benedictine monastery of Weltenberg Abbey,
my father touches the ornately guilded wall
and smiles:
"I remember tasting the dark beer here,
which the monks have brewed since 1050,
it was the only food I had that day,
simply divine."
Nostalgia warms our hearts
when we visit the beautiful
Austrian city of Salzburg,
remembering the wintry day
we met here for the first time
after the communism fell appart.
The Danube Wachau Valley
is littered with medieval castles
on hilltops
surrounded by grapevines
and picturesque willages,
most of them in ruins,
having never been rebuilt
after the Ottoman Turks destroyed them.
"Austrians have never been keen on refugees,
maybe their castles would look better if they did,"
My father winks at me
and waves at me to climb
the treacherous path
to the rubble of Durnestein.
My reward is the most magnificent view
of the magical Danube river,
my father points at the distance:
"There is Vienna, the city of Dreams,
we used to drive there for a coffee
with your mum,
before the Russians came with tanks."
I catch my breath and take his hand:
"You bought her there the print
by painter Gustav Klimt,
I remember seeing it on the wall
in our living room."
My father nods and his voice shakes
with hidden emotion:
"Can you see your former eastern bloc city
of Bratislava behind it?"
I strains my eyes on a blue blob
wondering
if those murky
and grey block of flats
of the dark
dictatorial decades
of my childhood
have been finally replaced
by the brightly coloured houses,
I always dream to live in.
"How was it to live there,
I often wondered,
thinking constantly of your mum,
of you,
the length love has to go to,
the tautness of a family
stretched like a tendon
across a wide ocean,
the homesickness never leaves you,
now you know..."
"Sad, drab lives built on lies and excuses,"
I said bitterly:
"My teenager's years and those of my friends
spent in hunger for escape..."
"And you did," my father whispers,
"escaped the stupefying comforts of home
and found a measure of contentment in doing so,
but have you found a place to settle and properly enjoy it
on the other side of the world?"
Three days in Bratislava
are three days of wondrous self-discovery
from the 1000-year-old castle
offering expansive views
of our own childhood memories,
father looks over the east
where his parents' old fashioned farm house
used to stand,
now rubbish tip lost in fumes
from nearby factory.
"You know, love happens, like age
or weather,
it's not hard to do,
only endure."
I look over the west,
where
the army of grey block of flats
still stands
having been formed
by history red
in tooth and claw:
"You know,
it was the absence of event,
boredom,
frustration
fear and even ugliness
that made me hungry
for life elsewhere
and it is still there."
We strolled down to the Safarikovo Square,
where my father showed me the old apartment
he used to own
and apparently I was born there
and spent my first few months of my life.
Now there is a fashionable cafe underneath.
My father slowly sips his short black
looking around and realizing suddenly
that his hometown is becoming
just like any other city of the west,
he goes on to complain on living
in an age
where everything has got to be now,
because consumerims is based on change.
"You are getting old," I jokingly chip in.
"And tired of living," there is a melancholy in his voice:
"and wondering whether travel allows us to find ourselves
or confirm our alienation,
our essential loneliness in the world."
