Columbia College Chicago :::: Fiction Writing Department

My grandfather built roads in Hungary. His teams cut through forests and plains leaving ribbons of dirt roads in networks well used by one army after another. Stories of him chill me, but the most chilling thing of all is knowing that his blood runs in my veins. He was a mean man. He had no heart, not for a mother with babe in arms, a feeble old woman, or a blind man. One day he was running behind schedule, working deep in the forest making a clean wide road out of an old mountain trail. A tree, just felled blocked the trail ahead and his road gang huddled at one end around a small fire, blowing clouds of steam onto their cracked and swollen fingers. His voice echoed through the mist as he bellowed at his men, “I'll not be made a fool of by you lazy bastards, we're not stopping because you fucking buzerans want to warm your dainty hands!” It was a dark winter's morning and the clang of axes and pitchforks soon rang again, so they didn't hear the rattle of the approaching wagon until it was right upon them. Vardo, traditional gypsy wagons , were a familiar sight to the road gang, but it was unusual to find one traveling alone, especially when driven by a solitary old woman. Hungary's gypsies, the Cigány , traveled in kumpania , rarely alone. She was bent forward over her reins, and her wizen leathered face peered at them from under a dikló wrapped around her head. She was dressed in the layers of a widow's garb and her tired old boots were tied to her feet with coarse twine. Her old nag, on the other hand, was still as fine a horse as they'd seen, and it snorted great puffs of white as it halted at the felled tree.

“Get out of here, nyanya !” Grandfather stood before the horse, hacked and spat at its feet.

“I must pass this morning,” she replied, in a tone both urgent and pleading.

“She must pass this morning,” he sang in a mocking response, turning to his men, bent and crooked, with a rag pulled over his head.

The dutiful laughter of the men bounced about the trees surrounding her, but she spoke again, firmer this time, “I need to get through the forest this morning.”

Grandfather laughed, started to turn away, with a scoffing shake of his head, then stopped and picked up a handful of stones and threw them at the horse. The old mare startled, rearing up and back on her hind legs, and the wagon shook, making an awful rattling sound of banging pans, creaking wood, and old iron wheels skidding on stones.

Still she persisted, the old woman, cooing to the horse and standing her ground. A third time she spoke, “I must pass on this trail, as I have for many years. I must pass this morning.”

With temper riled Grandfather turned back, lunged at the vardo and let loose his vile tongue, “Húzz a picsába, boszorkány!” Again he hurled stones, this time hitting the old woman on her lip. A trickle of blood ran down her cheek.

For a moment the forest was still, as is if all life had ceased in one breath, then she raised her hand to her lip, touched the blood, looked at her red fingertip, then shot her attacker a piercing eye, “ Átkokat szór vki fejére, gadje! ” she cried, disappearing into the fog, “A curse on you, infidel, a curse on you and your children and your children's children.”

It's only a story, and I didn't hear this one until very recently, but it is one piece of the story that tells where I come from. I know so little about my grandfather that each morsel of information is a prize. I know only his legacy. I'm not really superstitious, but there is something about the curse that appeals to me, an understanding of my family's estrangement that is not simply hereditary. It gives me hope. But one big problem remains. I know he was tainted well before the gypsy's curse. His cruelty is a legend in itself and his wife knew best of all. From all I've heard he sounds like the archetypal hot-headed, hot-blooded, crazed Hungarian. My Grandmother inherited vineyards, refused to sign the property over to her husband, holding out, knowing she was dying, that this was all she had to give her children - my father and his two sisters. To Grandfather, poisoned by alcohol and plagued by demons, this insult was intolerable. To own property was his dream, and his wife's inheritance was his only hope. In his drunken rages he beat the children, simply to torture her. One night she was warned he was on his way home, drunk and riled. She hid the children in the woodpile and my father held his little sisters, hand tight over the baby's mouth, as they watched him whack their mother across the back with a slab of wood because she refused to tell where they were. When my father told me this story he was seventy five, but he looked like a little boy as he spoke in a sad, scared voice, reliving the memory, going back in time to the very moment, as old people can do. His eyes did not see me, he was seeing his mother's knees buckle, her hands reaching back to the pain, her body falling limp and broken to the dirt.

When my father was five his mother died of tuberculosis, just as nine of her children had. She knew her two oldest children were survivors, sturdy and shrewd, but the baby was different. As she lay dying, fearing for the life of her youngest child, she begged her brother to take Sharika, who was only four. Great Uncle Bela knew her fear was real, more than once his sister had appeared at his door in the black of night with the sobbing babe in arms, one or both of them bruised and bloodied, so he agreed. At the funeral he took Sharika's hand and asked her, “How would you like to come with me and we'll buy you some beautiful new dresses?” From that day on Sharika called Bela and his wife, Mother and Father.

I left home at sixteen and worked tirelessly to divorce my identity from my past, my family. The life I was born into was nothing to be proud of and most of our stories were best forgotten. I wanted my stories to be about making my own way in the world. Stories about making dreams come true. Stories I can be proud of.

The stories of my childhood in Tasmania rise to the surface of my mind, bloated corpses that refuse to stay dead. These stories weigh upon me as if I'm wearing a heavy woolen sweater, drenched in water, weighted down, dragging, prickly, and most of all, cold.

When I write I peel the first layer of images away and look behind them but again and again I'm faced with scenes from the memories I've spent a lifetime trying to forget.

Leaving home was once my only goal. My daydreams were full of escape to a different world, a world I patched together in collages of pictures cut from magazines. I could live a different life for hours on end in the pages of my scrapbooks. I could try on a different world each day, worlds of my own creation. I could have a different house, a different bedroom, different clothes and a different family anywhere I wanted, whenever I wanted. If only I could create scrapbooks of my past full of collages that are different to my memories. But I can't escape from my memories anymore than I can crawl away from my own skin. In Chicago, as far away from Australia as you can get on this planet, I discover that I have never left home. I carry within me everything that ever happened there, and these are the stories I must tell.

I didn't know then, as I do now, that it was a yearning to belong that would take me in full circle, that this yearning would carry me, with torrential force at times, as I searched from continent to continent for somewhere to rest, until I was ultimately drawn back to the very place from which I was so eager to run from.

III Chicago to Adelaide (South Australia)…10,000 miles (as the crow flies)… April 2003

I leave my children at home at a days notice to fly for twenty-four hours to Adelaide for my father's funeral. My older sister and two younger brothers meet me at the airport. We hold each other and I cry all the tears I've been blocking with the distraction of travel arrangements. They all have wet eyes, but Charlie is drained, Mik struggles to hold back his sobs and Sue will save any sobs she has left for when she is alone. They've already been together for a day and I feel now what they probably felt yesterday - being together makes it more real. Our father is dead. As always the hard stuff is left unsaid, and we talk only about easy things, like the plans, what has to be done.

“Mum isn't coming.” I say, knowing that this is news to no one.

“She told me she'd said goodbye to him years ago,” Suzanne answers. Mum said the same thing to me on the phone.

“But why isn't she here for us?” I ask, and Charlie says he'd asked her the same question.

“She said she might regret it later, but she thinks we need to be here on our own, without her, as his children, that she wasn't part of his life any more, and she just couldn't come.” Suzanne lives close to Mum and had seen her on her way to the airport.

“I guess she needs to handle it in her way,” Mik offers, and we all humm in agreement.

They all look older, more round at the middle, with lines like veils over the faces I recall. It's only a year or two since I've seen them, but we've all reached that age when a year or two can see the slide into middle age. Charlie, the oldest of my little brothers, drives us to my father's house. He is the only one of us who lives here and the last one of us to see our father alive. They'd argued, which is not unusual, Dad was a feisty man, and so is Charlie. He was always the one who stood up to Dad. To all the world Charlie can seem as fearsome as Dad ever was to us, but I know he is as just as soft as Dad was too. Like Dad he is a poet in warrior's armor.

I fix my damp gaze out the car window. Adelaide - the city of Churches. A city planned by visionaries, a square mile surrounded by a wide border of parklands. Proud of her architecture and her heritage, she never became top heavy, writing city ordinances to limit the height of buildings. The city looks smaller than it did two years ago, on my last visit. How is it that I can be away for years and then slip back in and know a place as if it is still home? Two years since I saw Dad . The streetscape seems one-dimensional, people sliding through like paper cut-outs. Everything is surreal since he died, as it must be. My world has never existed without him. I watch the paper people going about their day, untouched by grief.

We turn into the street where he lived. “Prepare yourself,” my sister Suzanne says, “the house is not like you remember.” We have so much and so little in common, my sister and I. She is pragmatic and effective. I'm more likely to ponder and wait for a ‘sign'. She says I think too much. I think she does too much. She did her homework while I played with my scrapbooks and talked with my girlfriends on the phone. At university she was President of Student Affairs, worked two jobs and was head of the local branch of Amnesty International. I missed classes for weeks on end, too stoned, too hung-over or too interested in staying in bed with my boyfriend. She was pretty and political and won a Rotary scholarship to study in Europe. I was anti-fashion, anti-establishment and dropped out of uni after my first year. She's always worked hard and had a plan. I've always been lucky, blown by the wind into fields of clover.

Now she looks like a glamorous Hungarian woman with her blonde curls and deep blue eyes, like Zsa Zsa Gabor, dramatic, sharp and undeniably beautiful.

As always she is the one to get down to business, the task of cleaning out Dad's house. What do I remember about this house? I'd never lived there, only visited, always in a hurry to leave. His house was an awkward blend of his past life, with crockery, ornaments and linen from our old family home, and a gaudy collection of Hungarian, Philippine and Canadian mementos from his life with his new wife and new daughters.

“What do you mean?” I ask Suzanne

“Well, I didn't know…” she pauses to swallow, her blue eyes shimmering under too much mascara, “he wasn't capable of looking after himself very well, at the end.” But we did know, he'd called to say he mixed up his medication, he was living on McDonalds, he'd got lost walking home from the corner shop, he'd blacked out in the supermarket, then came to not knowing how he got there, wondering if he was dreaming. When we organized a community nurse to visit him six months ago she'd arrived to find the house sparkling, Dad clean cut and bright eyed, and afternoon tea laid out on the table. He had spells, I'd told myself, mostly he was OK.

He is still present in this house, his scent lurks in the gloom. I wander about, vaguely hearing my brother Charlie tell me, “He was in the shower… getting ready for Sunday mass… his clothes laid out on the bed.”

Most of the house feels hollow, abandoned and left to ruin. Like a body without a soul. It smells of neglect and loneliness. He'd lived alone for a year, since his second wife moved out, taking the girls. It looks as if they'd left in haste, drawers in the girls' bedroom hang open, the floor is scattered with old clothes, and the wall is dotted with remnants of stickers and posters of pop stars. There are no plans to see Dad's wife and daughter's until the funeral, and I'm relieved. I know their lives too well, I know what they've lived through. We'd talked on the phone every few months, I knew he hadn't changed, and I know that they had to leave, just as I had, but I can't help wishing they'd not left him all alone. To hear their stories was to relive my own. I don't want to be close to them, they're part a world that existed without me, a whole other life he'd lived with another family. The only thread that had joined me to his new family was broken when he died.

They are not here now, this work is left for us to do. We need to ‘get his things in order', to tie everything up in a neat bow, once and for all.

Suzanne is right, I am shocked by the mess in his house, ashamed I had not known how bad it was, hadn't done anything about it. Ashamed I hadn't been there, that he was so alone. I can't believe his ex-wife and the girls let him live this way. That I had. The laundry is piled deep, cupboards are tangled and overflowing, bedrooms littered with debris. To save on heating and air-conditioning he lived in one room. His whole world packed tight into one cozy, safe room. His comfy chair, with an old blanket covering shredded upholstery, sits in front of the TV, next to the phone, the heater and the kitchen door. An ash tray, with one cigarette butt, his glasses, taped together at the bridge, and a pile of old newspapers and opened letters cover the surface of the small table beside his chair. The newspapers are yellowed, months old, he couldn't read for the past few months. My brother would visit him to read my letters. I can see him now, sitting there in his pistachio sweatshirt with the TV on for company, letter in hand as he fades in and out of sleep, waiting for the sound of Charlie's bike pulling into the driveway. Then growling, of course, because Charlie was too late, or too early, or woke him up, or didn't bring him a treat, or did, and he was trying to give them up. I swallow the laughter muffled by sadness rising in my throat, he was such a crank old bastard, and I wonder where to start.

Here we all are, in his house. Nothing would have made him happier than to have us all to be here when he was still alive. But like all family events it would've ended badly, marred by his wretched temper.

The shelves lining one wall in his living room are jammed with papers, albums, photos of his children, his grandchildren, and my baby, his only grandson. The coffee table is overflowing with files and boxes of papers and newspaper cuttings, documents and photos. The sofa is his wardrobe, a mountain of underwear, socks and un-ironed shirts, and trousers hang along the back. I have to step over furniture to get from the kitchen door to the window. The musty smell a room shut off from the world is suddenly gagging me and I try to force a window open, but they're nailed shut.

The records and remnants of his life are jam-packed into this one room, as if he'd needed to surround himself with his history. If, in a moment of doubt, he needed proof of a life fully lived it was all there, only an arms length away. The pain in his old bones was such that moving from one room to another had become too much, yet nothing we could say would convince him to leave his house. He'd end all attempts to persuade him abruptly. “A man is nothing without a home.”

No-one has wanted to clean his bedroom, the room I most want to see. It's not quite pleasure, but almost, that makes me stop at the door and peer in. The adrenalin rush of anticipation makes me aware that I am trespassing. It's voyeuristic, searching through his private spaces, but I can't resist. I feel like I'm at a murder scene searching for clues. He still slept in a waterbed, my tender laugh surprises me, but the linen is thin and worn, the curtains shabby, and my brief sense of humor is squashed. I pull the curtains wide, to see everything. His bible and a collection of prayer books are all I find in his bedside table. His wife's drawers are still half full of old clothes and broken jewelry. A shabby thing to do to him, to leave her mess. His wardrobe is full of clothes he wore when I was a child, shirts I remember him wearing, all patterned with greens and maroons from the seventies with big pointy collars and short, wide matching paisley ties. I find a woolly vest that still holds his scent, his favorite pistachio colored sweatshirt, and his old pipes. His old work overalls are folded under a pile of old clothes in the bottom of the cupboard. I remember him wearing them, laboring in his factory six days a week, year after year. All the clothes look so tiny, it's hard to imagine that when he wore them he'd seemed so big and strong to me. He was a little man, scraping five foot two, but his charisma filled any room. I pack these treasures into the little tan leather suitcase he'd carried on the boat from Europe to Australia fifty-five years ago.

I find his black Hamburg hat. I don't pick it up, don't want to touch it. He'd worn this hat with such pride, in those days when men wore hats. He felt like a gentleman in this hat. It was his symbol of everything good in life and it made him feel six feet tall. It was quite a different symbol for me. To this day the sight of such hats will make me look twice, but in those days the sight of them was terrifying. I still have nightmares about men in black hats. When I left home to go to university I broke all his rules and was tortured by neurotic fear and guilt. I have been courageous in the years since then, in odd ways, in choices I've made, but there's little I've feared more than my father's anger. Once out of his sight I was free to play with fire.

When I first left home I saw his hat in my peripheral vision every day, convinced he was waiting, just out of view, to catch me doing something he would not approve of. Once, when he met the guys I shared a house with, he threatened to drag me home by my hair, and lock me in a cupboard. The guys played in a band and had regular weekly gigs, but none of us had any money, and we were all into a drugged out-grungy-hippy look. They were into heroin, mushrooms, acid and music and that particular cocktail just left you looking that way, particularly when you're broke. I wanted to be part of the scene, but was too scared of heroin, so never really fit in. Dad's threat to drag me home was very real and imminent, so I had to promise him I'd move out. But that wasn't enough, he hated my boyfriend too.

I wasn't allowed to have boyfriends at home, and my first boyfriend when I left was everything Dad hated. Paul had red hair (an omen of evil in Hungarian superstition) and it hung long to his waste, he wore an earring, loved drugs, was unemployed and played guitar. I lived in fear that Dad would surprise me with a visit and catch us in bed. I had no doubt someone would end up dead. I knew Paul's rage would rise to challenge Dad's, but would never be a match. When he did meet Paul on a visit to uni he wouldn't even speak to him, hated him at a glance.

So, Dad bought a house for my sister and I to live in while we were at uni, a mansion compared to what I could afford on my scholarship, but the day we moved in he threatened me, “I'm going to turn up whenever I want, and if I ever catch anyone here with long hair, or who is on the dole, you'll be sorry!” That night I rang him, knees shaking, and said,

“Your house, your rules, fine! I'm moving out.”

He disowned me and we didn't speak for a year.

As afraid of him as I was of him, being separated from him was even more terrifying. I went back to him. Always did. It didn't matter if I we were together or not anyway, he was always there. Just as he is now, in his house. He is always present, in his black Hamburg hat, always lurking like a spy in my shadow, censoring my every thought and deed. My measure. My jailer.

A pile of clothes on a chair look worn and crumpled. I lift his undershirt to my face and breathe him in and his smell engulfs me. Instantly it is if I am in his embrace, I hear him say my name, he is laughing tenderly, “My Kinchyka,” he repeats and I know in every cell of my body that he does love me, he really does. I forgive him for everything, again. The wave of his presence is too much, my knees buckle and I fall onto his bed. I bury my face in his pillow and a groan rises, becoming a wail, and the waves come again, each one deeper, until I feel my little brother Mik stroking my hair, and I become still and silent.

This moment happens over and over, waves rolling in and out, until I'm drowning in grief, afraid I'll never see the surface, but the waves do recede, and I stand again and work my way through the piles of his debris. We are each in a different room, wandering together now and again to show what we have found. A letter, an old photo, a pewter beer mug we'd given him for father's day.

In time the mess becomes too much for me, so I volunteer to go with Charlie to organize the memorial cards for Dad's funeral service. Before we leave the four of us have a cup of tea, huddling over his kitchen table, sipping out of cups we've known for thirty years. Two photos are chosen. In one, his own favorite, he is young and handsome, his chin proud, eyes cheeky, seductive. The other photo is how we want to remember him, a cheerful grandfather, old, round cheeked and smiling. The words are harder to choose. How do we say we hated him, feared him, avoided him and yet somehow forgave him and still loved him. We can't, so instead we choose to simply honor him, as he would wish:

In loving memory of Károly “Charlie” Hegedus

Born in Kecskemét, Hungary

to Zsuzsanna and Károly

Charlie migrated to his beloved Australia in 1950

But the richness of the Great Hungarian Plain,

and the exuberance of the Bugac Puszta never left his heart.

Cherished and devoted father of Suzanne, Kinchem, Charles, Miklos, Charlene and Krystale. Beloved Grandfather of Sophie, Eva, Isolde, Shannon and William.

Adored brother of Zsuzsanna, Sharika, Erzsike, Bela, Sandor, Zoltan

On the back of the card we add the words given to us by one of Dad's sisters, Sharika, who I discover this day lives only an hour's flight from me in the US! I know nothing about her, except that she left Dad's home when she was only two, when their mother died. She writes:

Bucsuzunk tolled Károly! Nyugodjal bekebe.

We take our goodbye from you, Károly! Be in peace.

Hianyozni fogsz eletunk vegig.

We will miss you as long as we live.

Charlie and I return to Dad's house to find our family history on the kitchen table, my father's collection of 35mm slides, photos taken from the time he and my mother first met until I was around seven years old. Charlie glances at them and leaves the room. My father and I spoke a week before he died. He'd called to say he was packing up the slides to send to me in Chicago. He knew I was writing, and he wanted me to have them, he wanted me to write our stories. Charlie told me on the phone, the day Dad died, that Dad had spent the last month of his life sorting through the slides, preparing them to send to me, that he'd been as happy as he'd ever been, reliving moments caught on film. Projecting his life on the wall to see again and again, as the carousel on the projector went around and around. “When he looked at the slides,” Charlie said, “his eyes were liquid, equal parts happy and sad.”

“Can you do the shelves in the lounge room?” Suzanne is behind me, I know she wants the slides too, but no-one has yet mentioned which keepsakes we want to take. I don't know how to bring it up, so I do as she asks. It will not end well with Suzanne, I know. I feel the life long tension between us. She was first born and then I'd come along and destroyed her paradise and she'd never forgiven me. I'd become Daddy's little girl and the devil in me knew how to wield that power to push her buttons. Now she thinks I am stealing him away again, stealing what she most wants, the slides. I feel so damn bitchy towards her. It's about money too, she never has any, but always seems to be able to go on vacations. I'm paying for the funeral. I promised Dad I would, he knew she wouldn't.. But it's more than that, it's about the money I lent her that she never paid back, and it's about the time she punched me, tucked in bed, because I wouldn't get up to turn off the light, and the time she ripped my favorite doll in two, the way she never let me in to her heart, the way we could never talk about the hard stuff. So much unsaid, unresolved. I am afraid of the anger I feel for my sister. I avoid her.

The deeper we clean the house the more we find. He'd kept everything. I find the letters I'd written to him over the years. He'd stored every letter, every card, every photo I'd ever sent. Stacks and boxes and piles of papers and documents are everywhere, some dating back more than fifty years. Sepia postcards, touched up with pastel paints, and written in Hungarian; his first passport; newspaper cuttings of brief moments of local fame as a successful businessman; brochures; and even check books from his businesses, decades old. Receipts for everything.

Slowly the days pass and the job is done. All is ‘in order', the front door closed and the car is bursting with keepsakes. The rest will be collected by St Vincents. We drive home to Charlie's place in the dark, hungry, tired and ready for a bottle of wine.

Before the funeral I am the one who goes to talk with the priest about the sequence of events. We have Hungarian music to play, and Suzanne, Charlie, Mik & I each want to speak. I find him in a brick veneer office behind the 1970's ‘modern' style Catholic Church, the type with the huge A line roof and blonde pine pews. Father Paul is Irish, in his sixties.

“I find its best,” he says, “if you don't all get up to speak” he says.

“Best for who?” I ask, angry at being told how to do my father's funeral.

“Well, I find everyone ends up saying basically the same thing, you know, ‘he was a good man and all and this and that' and, well, let's face it, most people are not so good at public speaking at the best of times, let alone under these circumstances.”

He sits back, arms crossed, confident he's made a good point, then abruptly sits forward adding in a whisper,

“Most people break down you know, it's very difficult.”

“I see.” I answer, shocked at his perspective. “The thing is we don't really see this as a performance for the sake of an audience.”

I know I have his attention now, because he coughs to clear his throat and adjusts his white collar.

“We each need to speak for our father, for our own sake, and because we know he'd want us to.”

He nods in resignation, palms up, shoulders shrugged.

The central section of the church is full when I arrive and I hug Dad's two daughters and his wife as I enter the Church. They are already sobbing and can't talk. Dad's casket is in position, draped in the Hungarian flag, and sitting on top is a bouquet of flowers and a framed photo of him in his early twenties, wearing a soldier's uniform, chin held high. I approach to place the letter I wrote last night in the bouquet and find another there, in an envelope with the word ‘Daddy' written on it. I guess it's from his youngest daughter. My family sits on the front pew on one side and his other daughters and their mother sit on the front pew on the other side. I am perversely thrilled by the privilege of a front row pew.

I glance behind me, but there is no-one I know. Maybe eighty people, most of whom are single matrons dressed in black. ‘Horny old bastard' I think before I can stop myself. I laugh, then cry, just quietly. My sister is greeting people until it is time to be seated, my brothers sit on either side of me, Charlie stern and still, Mik fidgety. He reaches for my hand. Time begins to flow around me, edges blur, colors seep, surreal, and the priest is there and he talks about seeing Dad every Sunday, rain or shine, at the back of the church in his ‘Charlie-mobile' ( the scooter he needed to get around once the pain in his legs became too much too walk, and his eyes were too weak to drive).

Suddenly it is time to talk and my sister is first. She is trained in public speaking and is composed and prepared.

“I want to speak of the successes and achievements in my father's life,” she begins, and she tells of all he was proud of. Coming to a new country with nothing, not speaking the language and building a life, a business and a home for his family. Working tirelessly, never giving up with his inventions, a consummate entrepreneur, like the many refugees and migrants who have labored, not for themselves, but for future generations, to make Australia into the country she is today.

My turn. I walk to the microphone, unfold the paper I wrote on last night. It's as if I am in front of an audience reading my work, until I begin, and then I feel myself falling into the words and there is nothing but me, my words and my father.

“I remember the soft ripples of the waves of your hair

I remember how easily you could make me laugh, even when I didn't want to

I remember how you always tilted your head to the side when you asked for something

I remember your smell, garlic, fresh cut wood chips and cinnamon

I remember how you'd make me gargle hot salty water and wrap my throat in itchy woolen scarves if I had a sore throat

I remember how you'd pile my soft toys, especially my Tasmanian Devil, on top of my bedroom door every night, and they'd fall on me in the dark and scare the its out of me every time

I remember how that made you laugh until you cried

I remember how you'd get so angry at the evening news and yell at the TV as if the newsreader could hear you

I remember how huge you were when I was a little girl

I remember how frightened you looked when you were woken suddenly from a deep sleep

I remember how you loved so much to make people laugh, and how you always could

I remember how you looked like a little boy when you laughed

I remember how happy you were when you held my babies

I remember how you worked from dawn to dusk then sat in your Jason recliner, watched the news and fell asleep

I remember how you were so proud of me and how proud that made me feel

I remember how you cried when you made your speech at my wedding, and I went to your side and out my arm around you

I remember massaging your shoulders

I remember how happy you sounded every time I phoned you

I remember your smile

I remember your kiss

I remember your hands

I remember your love

I remember you as my Daddy”

I go back to my seat and Mik squeezes my hand. I've made it through with cracks in my voice and a few long pauses, and now Charlie is there.

“I just want to say” he announces in a tone strong and tough like a sword that swipes through the sentiment of my words, “that my father was always a man who supported the underdog. He gave jobs to migrants who no-one would employ because they didn't speak English well enough. Even when he got burnt by a few of ‘em who turned out to be lazy bloody no-hopers he'd still give the next guy off the boat a go. He never forgot those who'd given him a chance, and was always ready to give that back. That was my father and that's all I want to say.” He nods, and smiles and practically marches back to his seat. A splatter of laughs and nods ripple across the church pews and I see Mik take a deep breath before rising walking hesitantly forward.

His lips squeeze tight, then pucker, and I know he is struggling to get the words out. When he does they pour forth, floodgates asunder, and his speech is awash with sobs and tears. “My father, Karoly…” he stops, sobs and has to remove his glasses to mop his eyes with a handkerchief before he can go on, “was Hungarian. As much as he loved this country, Australia…” he has to stop again, his sobbing shakes him, but he continues, “he was always proud of his beautiful homeland. And I'll never forget… the joy in his face,” now he really dissolves, and we sit and watch and let him be until he's ready go on. At first I want to rush to his side and hold him, but I don't, deciding that he wants to be there alone at this moment. He coughs, then finishes, “I'll never forget the joy in his face when I was with him in his home town, with his family, in Hungary.”

The funeral is over too quickly, the four of us and two men from the funeral parlor, are pall bearers, and in the blink of an eye he is in the hearse. The final glimpse of the coffin is too much to bear and I cling to it, holding him, wailing like a widow until Mik and Charles are there again, pulling me into their ample, silent embrace.

At the wake, in my post-sobbing meltdown, I hit the barack, Hungary's fabulous apricot brandy, and I dribble into the room full of faces I don't know. The heat of barack is instantly, mercifully soothing and I slide through the crowd in Dad's living room trying to look as if I'm on my way somewhere important so no-one stops me to talk. There is scarcely a trace of him left in this room now, only his old photos left on the shelves for this occasion. God he loved parties, I think to myself, remembering how he'd work the crowd until he'd won over the entire room with his childlike humor and irresistible charm, telling his silly dirty jokes, flirting with the women, teasing the men. I smile and nod as I go, turning towards the increasing number of eruptions of laughter. The barack is quick to work its magic on the crowd and I catch fragments of the stories we all love to remember at alcohol imbued wakes. An inordinate number of widows and matrons who seem to know him well cluster around the room, clinking glasses and a few of them catch me and these strangers put their warm arms around me and tell me, “He loved you very much.”

His cleaning lady touches my arm, “We were very close, towards the end, your father and I, and I feel like I know you. He was so proud of you.” She looks like a real Aussie broard, weathered by the sun, and her manner is anything but refined but something seems different to the others and I like her, so I stop a moment.

“You must have the patience of a saint,” I laugh, hugging her. She laughs a big and open laugh. The strength in her touch is surprising too.

“No, just tough enough to tell him I wouldn't take any of his shit.” Her voice hushes before she goes on, “But you know, he was soft as butter at then end, just a gentle lonely old man.”

We squeeze each others' hands and move on.

“Why didn't your mother come?” Dad's wife asks me, “I hope it wasn't because of me?” She and I have always had a frank relationship, and I do like her, in that biased way that you like the partner of someone you're close to, but tend to side against them when you have to. I feel guilty for the times I sided against him, when I told her I knew she was telling the truth, when she'd phoned me to say she was leaving him, and she needed to hear me say it was okay, she should go, and I did. She's closer to my age then my father's, and still a good looking woman. She stayed with the old bastard for more than twenty years. “You know I still love him,” she said the day she left, “I just can't take it any more.”

“Mum didn't come because she didn't want to,” I tell her. One of the Philippina matrons appears and sweeps Dad's wife up in her arms and I back away.

I want to be alone with my memories of him, so I slip out the back for a cigarette. In the heat of the flame of my lighter I see him.

In the sweltering heat of an Australian summer outlines blur and shimmer in that haze that makes time stand still.

It ‘s 1957. In the midday thickness of this heat, in McKay, a small coastal town in Australia, a small foreign looking man is loitering outside the corner shop, leaning against the wall and fanning himself with his prized brown felt Hamburg hat. It is his day off from cutting sugar cane. His crisply ironed Sunday best is now limp and wilted and marked with pools of sweat.

Every time the fly screen door to the shop opens a yawning metallic creak draws his eyes towards it. He's waiting for someone.

He'd spotted her that morning, when he still felt fresh, and found himself following her for hours. Something about the way her round hips swayed from side to side to side, the way her dark curls framed her face, the intoxicating line of her breasts, something, or everything, made her irresistible.

She finally emerges from the shop, his Goddess of curves. He springs to life, mops his forehead with his handkerchief, replaces his hat and unleashes his wily charms.

He watches for a moment, drinking her in. She sits on a wooden bench under the store's awning, fans her face with one hand and sips on her ice-cold lemonade. She lifts the drink to her delicious red lips, a boy darts past her, bumps her raised elbow, splattering her chest with her lemonade. The man lunges at her, handkerchief still in hand, attempting to wipe away the spill, muttering and perhaps even laughing, “Let me help, let me help.”

The woman is stunned, first by the boys, then by the cold splash of juice and the chill of ice-cubes slipping into her cleavage and especially by this crazy man patting at her breasts. After a flash of stillness she tries to swat the man away, leaning back and flicking at him with one hand whilst fishing for ice-cubes with the other. Her thumb hooks under her string of faux pearls, the string snaps and a hundred pearls fly in all directions, on her lap, under the seat and bouncing like raindrops across the sidewalk.

The man drops to his hands and knees gathering the pearls, with the same wide sweep of his arms that he uses to cut the cane. “I'm zo zorry, Jesus Christ! Zo zorry, Miss, I fix, I fix.” His head dips, his hat slips forwards and his chin skims the floor at her feet. His face is lost in her skirts as he reaches under her seat in search of more pearls.

“Stop, please, just stop!” The woman is exasperated. She'd been feeling particularly fragile all day, in all the heat, and this is all too much! She slaps at the man's shoulders, and his funny little brown head bobbing up and down looks like a cupie-doll. It's just so absurd, she starts laughing, first quietly, to herself, and then her laughter ripples outwards, and the small dazed crowd of on-lookers join in.

The man finally stops his rescue efforts and sits back on his haunches as the day's anticipation, brought on by hours of stalking, shakes through him in waves of breathless boyish giggles. His laugh subsides, he stands and wipes his teary eyes and plops down on the seat beside her.

With laughter still clinging to their words they introduce each other, Charlie and Rosina.

She has the uncanny feeling that she knows him, making her more easily seduced. It's not until much later that she finds out that this sense of familiarity was probably because of the number of glimpses of him that had leaked into her peripheral vision earlier that day. “Have we met somewhere before?” she asks.

She already has a leaning towards foreign men, having grown up with the type of raw, green farm boys that New Zealand breeds, and she is bored with the laconic, roughness of the Australian men she's met since arriving three months earlier. Charlie is different, he oozes a seductive European charm. He looks romantic and is obviously prepared to do whatever it takes to get her attention.

God only knew how much she needed to laugh. In his thick Hungarian accent he asks her to have dinner with him and while she was considers her response he lowers his big brown eyes and puckers his lips saying, “You have zee bootivul moo-cow eyes.” She doesn't mean to laugh at his accent, but she can't help it and he laughs with her and she says, “Oh, come on Charlie, you'll have to do better than that.” Charlie is quick to reply, “I zink I in love vit you.”

Charlie is hot-blooded too, which she discovers that very night, a night of passion that seals their fate as lovers first, then husband and wife. The heat of the physical attraction that slaps them together that first night is the rapturous side of a two-edged blade. The underside is just as powerful, a destructive brew of passion mixed with incompatibility that would have surely kept a more levelheaded pair apart.

Just two days after they meet Rosina realizes that the mounting feeling of vulnerability she'd become aware of over the past few weeks is due to the fact that she is already eight weeks pregnant to a jackaroo at Thylungra. Charlie says he doesn't care.

“There you are,” Charlie's voice pulls me back,” I was wondering where you'd disappeared to.”

“Too much barack ” I mutter, holding out my empty glass to him for a refill.

“Pretty good, isn't it?” he laughs, “Mik's showing the video of Dad's visit to Hungary if you want to see it.”

We go back in, but there are too many people crowded around the screen, and Mik's already given me a copy to take home, so I go to look at the old photos again. We're all there, all his children and grandchildren, his wife, and the photo of him as a soldier is there too. The one missing is that of his great love, my mother.