mucky pink blanket
He came in late at night and I dreaded it. I
would pretend I was asleep while he drunkenly crashed his way round the house
and in my room. "Son", he would say, sitting at my bed, "You have no idea. And
you lot have no feelings. Whatsoever". And I knew there was no use in pretending
to be asleep. I was in for a rough ride through times and people I didn't care
for. All I wanted was to get some sleep before having to get up at six for
another nightmarish day at school.
The
war often came up in these long drunken monologues ("Are you listening? Do you
realise the gravitiy of the things I'm telling you? People died, you know"). In
front of my sleepy eyes there would open a sombre landscape in black and white
(all those war films, I suppose), with my father as a terrified 17 year old
running across muddy fields covered in corpses. Or the one about their mate who,
sitting in a vivac in the middle of a forest, finally flips and announces that
he is curious about what is inside a hand grenade and he is going to open it up
to find out. Or the little snippets in which one glimpsed the fact that he was a
pawn, a cog in an instrument of oppression: he is checking some cargo being
unloaded from a ship at Pyreos in Greece when suddenly out of a warehouse corner
there comes a burst of automatic gun fire and his companion drops to the floor,
his body covered in bullet holes: according to my father he was only saved
because the resistance militiaman threw himself against the wall of the
warehouse as he pulled the trigger so the bullets came out as a vertical spray
rather than horizontal...
This would go
on for hours on end -or so it seemed. I so hated it all, it made me feel so
miserable for myself and, a little bit, for the unfortunate sods caught in that
nightmare. But it was difficult for me to understand and feel sympathy. I was
too young and had no understanding of what I was hearing. In fact I have
forgotten most of those stories, only remember tiny snippets of a couple of
ones. How could I grasp the getting caught in the great whirlwind of history
when I was living such different times, only concerned with how much i hated
school and surviving in it and in our bizarre, dysfunctional family
environment?
Also the stories he did
not himself witness, of his family having to fight the retreating Germans, the
story of an attempted rape and the pursuit of the two German soldiers across the
fields and their gruesome hunt and end. His uncle Francesco taking him to the
fairs when he was a child and getting knifed and dying in front of him. Having
to get up in the freezing cold in winter, wash with cold water, milk cows and
shovel snow before setting out on the three mile walk to school, down the
mountain and up the mountain on the slippery icy
road.
"You lot have no feelings, no
understanding". Of course I thought it was him that had no feelings and no
understanding. Now I can get a tiny glimpse of what he went through, what made
him such a difficult person to live with, chased by demons whose nature we
couldn't fathom and whose existence we rarely guessed.
Posted: Tue - June 15, 2004 at 09:45 AM