My spongy hands dig deep into the damp, grassy field. My legs are planted in an up-right position, ready to pounce at any notice. My eyes shift towards the man to my right, also firmly entrenched in a position of alertness. “Ready.. Steady.. Go!” he shouts out loud. My heartbeat flutters, as do my legs, which rise three feet into the air. Like a racehorse released from its cage, I launch with a powerful burst of force akin to that of an Olympic athlete. The terrain feels like sponge cake as my feet dart across its auspice plain. I see the sinewed shape of his back ahead of me. I am in awe over the rapid, swift strides he takes with ease. I summon every ounce of energy within my tiny, elastic body as I eye the finish line twenty strides ahead. My breath turns into a deep hoarse pant, my lungs expand, stealing as much air as they possibly can. My legs grow lighter and my arms flail up and down without any thought from my brain. My body is instinctively using every filament within its limbs, blood vessels, organs and sinew to rush forward to the finish line. No brain activity is required. The heart simply understands my will and forces my legs forth with a passionate, persuasive push. I look to my right and my body is now horizontally even with his. Less than ten paces from the finish line. My body starts to gain distance from his. I am winning, I think to myself. With little breath left in me, I begin to laugh. My body is weightless. He smiles as he crosses the finish line behind me. My legs flop onto the ground beneath me. The cool wetness of the grass welcomes me. I look up and watch the mist smear the purple sky. The sun is beginning to rise to the east. Strange sounds from afar can be heard. No words are exchanged between my father and I. None are needed. Heads leaned back, we lay sprawled on earth and laugh like Kings. Our bodies take in the magnetic morning and our eyes are drawn to the masterfully arranged Arabic sky. The year is 1989. We are in Cairo, Egypt.
June 9, 2009 at 7:33 am
It is a two and a half hour drive to the farm from Melbourne. The ultraviolet sun beats down hard on the fading red Holden station wagon. I sat in the back seat, staring through the window to the east, watching the photochemical smog and city skyline receding farther and farther away into the horizon. With already thirteen straight weeks at the number one spot, Alanis Morisette’s song, “Ironic” has been blasting radio airwaves. Like most kids my age, I should have been at school that day, but because my parents were constantly on the move, they thought it was for my own good to travel with them, and be home-schooled on the road. I owe the unorthodox education of my early teenage years to my father and Ricki, my stepmother. We were going to visit the farm that Ricki’s father, Gunter, had built in the 1960s, when Ricki was still a child. Actually, her whole family was going to be there. I had already been to the farm several times so I knew what to expect – 56 acres of dry, mostly un-arable land, a farmhouse that was not connected to any main power grid or sewage system, a dated television that could barely pick up two local stations via a deformed metal coat hanger, and Gunter’s daft dog.
We arrived at noon, finding Gunter with his head under the hood of his unregistered 1956 pick-up truck, wearing a sweaty under-shirt, brown and black from engine grease, and red suspenders to keep his trousers high above his large, but charming, potbelly. When he heard the sound of our car doors slam shut, he finished what he was doing, then looked up and, seeing me rub my shoulder, grinned. “How is the old arm, lad?” he asked, chuckling.
The week before, when Gunter and his wife, Esther, and my parents and I were having lunch at the farm, Gunter was telling us one of his many stories, when outside in a full-sized eucalyptus tree, more than six dozen cockatoos were singing enthusiastically, repeatedly interrupting Gunter’s story. In a fit of rage, he stood up from the table, rushed to the next room to grab the long, double-barrel shotgun he had brought from South Africa, and charged out the front door, curiously followed by my father and me. He pointed the shotgun towards the tree, without taking the care to aim, and fired two thunderous shots. As the cockatoos scattered, dispersing away from the tree in a matter of seconds, my father and I stood in awe, gaping at the sight of one cockatoo falling out of the sky like a brick. Gunter turned to face us, carrying a smug expression on his face that said “what? I don’t need to aim,” immensely pleased with himself for having proven some sort of point. My dad looked more disgusted than shocked, not at the fact that the old man had just shot dead an innocent cockatoo that was merely exercising free speech, but with the fact that the gunslinger believed his successful kill was due to skill and not luck. I, on the other hand, couldn’t keep myself from smiling, and asked Gunter if I could give the hand cannon a try. “This one isn’t like the .22 you usually fire, boy” he replied, while dispensing the empty crumpled cartridges from the smoking barrel and reloading it with two new red ones from his pocket. Leaning his head close to my shoulders, I could smell Nana’s home-made lunch and whiskey in his breath as he placed the shotgun in my small, pliable hands and adjusted my slender arms into proper form. My father, at this point looking quite anxious, warned me of the powerful kickback. I took determined aim at a dead tree stump about twenty seven yards away, slowed my breathing like my father had taught me, pulled the trigger, and was suddenly, violently thrown back four feet into a cloud of dust.
A week later, my right shoulder was still purple, but not as sore as it had felt the day I fired Gunter’s big shotgun. I wondered where the gun had been, whose hands had held the smooth, dark wooden edges of the fore-end and stock, stared down at its cold metal sights, and what, or who, had been facing the ominous barrel. Apparently it was a relic from the Second World War. Gunter’s father had been forcibly thrown into the German army when Hitler’s army overtook his country, Czechoslovakia. His father’s entire family perished in the concentration camps. His father was never sent to the Front, and near the end of the war, with little choice, was quickly thrown into the British army once the Allies had arrived. After the war, he immigrated to London, where he set up a small business as a clothier, and eventually started a family with his future wife, Helda. Their son, Gunter, the only man left to carry his father’s family name, in his early twenties, wanted to join the army so he could “shoot some fucking Germans” but was only allowed to join the home guard as he was still a university student. At the farm, on the wall of the living room hung an elephant gun, which Gunter had brought back from Malawi, where he had once held a chief-like role – or so he liked to think – in a village, until the country eventually won independence from the British in the 1960s. Ricki’s name was actually Rebecca, but the locals had given her the nickname, “Ricki” which meant “Rebecca” in their native Bantu tongue. I couldn’t believe the gun, which looked like a giant trombone horn attached to a rifle, in the hands of a small man, could bring down a 15,000lb elephant. The house was filled with these kinds of artifacts of the past, reminders of a time before, and links to people who were no longer.
Gunter had built the one-storey house in the late 1960s after his family had immigrated to Australia. He built the farm on the side of a mountain facing opposite Melbourne as a bomb shelter because he was genuinely worried that “the Russians were coming!” From a bird’s eye view, one would see a very long, rectangular shaped metallic rooftop. Ricki’s brother, Gary, had built an extension in the 1970s, adding a second master bedroom, a study, a second den, and two bedrooms. One could easily see the furnishings and home-ware either reflected the murky yellowish tan or hideous deep purple of the seventies (thanks to Gary) or looked like an antique from the Crimean War. The grandfather clock that stood tall in the living room had belonged to Esther’s grandmother in Austria. The dining table, made of solid oak, had served at least two former generations. I remember when I sat at the table during meals, I never spoke unless spoken to as the saying I often heard was, “children should be seen but not heard.” Before every meal was over, Gunter never missed an opportunity to either say to a person with a spoon-full left – or less – on their plate, “if you were a poor, starving child in Africa, would you finish that last spoonful of food?” or “what if you were lost in the Sahara Desert?” He never asked those questions to Nana if she didn’t leave her plate empty because he knew full well he would get a prompt, thumping whack over his head!
During the evening, after dinner, Gunter would sit in his aged, wrinkly brown arm chair, next to the fireplace, with his dim-witted but loyal dog at his feet, hold his never-empty whiskey glass, and tell me stories of Ancient Rome, explain how Alexander the Great revolutionized military strategy, or describe the causes for the First and Second World Wars. The man, a heavy whiskey drinker, often offensive in speech, was a walking encyclopedia that never ceased to fascinate me. I would ask him a question about anything and he would give me an answer. I asked him how he knew so much about history and he told me he taught himself from reading books. I was still too young at the time to hold interest for more than five minutes reading any history textbook so I preferred to listen to the old man, who I liked to call my walking history book, or after the cockatoo incident, “Gunter the Hunter.” At night he slept in his own bedroom because he snored so loudly that Nana couldn’t sleep next to him. She told me that he would talk loudly in his sleep and that he would answer his own questions, often engaging in long, intense arguments with himself.
The old man, already in his early seventies, still worked hard, five days a week, running a plastic recycling factory he had built in the 1970s. He and his wife would stay at the farm over the weekends, caring to their garden, and the lemon orchard he had planted thirty years ago which looked more like a sad collection of ornamental bonsai trees that never grew any lemons. He didn’t need to keep running the factory, but he kept working because that’s just the man he was – he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t work – and he often joked he would likely be found dead while on the job. I remember one day, during a particularly hotter than usual heat wave, Gunter, my father, and I were about a quarter of a mile north of the house, cutting down some trees for firewood. Gunter and my dad were discussing the heat wave and dangers of a wild bush fire encroaching near the house. Childish boy that I was, often quick to speak before I thought about what I was about to say, I made a foolish remark on how funny it would be if a bushfire came and burnt down the house. Their conversation evaporated instantly, and I immediately realized I had said something I shouldn’t have, and when Gunter’s head turned towards me, I expected to see an angry red face, and possibly get a stinging belt across my ear, but I was shocked to see that his face, which moments ago had been red from the blistering sun, had turned pale as ivory white, and wore the most frightened expression I had ever seen. It reminded me of the previous day, when I had been hunting with a small .22 rifle, and after shooting a rabbit and walking towards my kill, I noticed that the creature was still breathing, but paralyzed, its eyes staring back at me, uncertain of what was to happen next. Standing there, I too was motionless, as I looked into Gunter’s big brown eyes, the same powerless and frightened looking eyes I had seen on the rabbit the day before. He never said a word; he didn’t have to. When I went to sleep that night, I lay there in my bed, stared out through the window at the black sky, and tried to make sense of what I had seen on Gunter’s face. There was something in the sincerity and gravity of his expression that meant more than just a reaction to my bad joke. A wild, uncontrollable bushfire could violently turn that farmhouse into ashes in under an hour and not Gunter, or anybody else, could prevent it. Sure, in suburbia, I have so much power in my hand; I can bring light to a darkened room with a flip of a switch, and punch three numbers into a telephone and have a fire brigade come to my doorstep within minutes. But in certain moments and places, even man is still helpless and powerless to the forces of Nature and of man. Everything on this earth, eventually, inevitably, turns to ash. That night I realized that Gunter wasn’t frightened so much in the prospect of losing the house and all its objects, but like the rabbit and his father, paralyzed in fear, was terrified at how small and vulnerable he felt in a situation over which he had no apparent control.
May 22, 2009 at 7:40 am
Just finished reading Norman Maclean’s, A River Runs through it.
