The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  Wow! we all exclaim.

  We are fascinated by the sight of creek water being parted and bubbles being churned into foam.

  I think they’re playing a game, I say.

  Nah, says Stefan. They’re hunting for food.

  Let’s hunt them, says Leon. He whips out his shanghai and selects a large red ironstone from the edge of the creek bank. Watch this! he yells. Plop. He misses whatever he was aiming at because it makes no difference to the turmoil in the water. Again he tries. Again the stone plops, sinks. The eels continue thrashing the water.

  Our eyes become accustomed to the glare on the water and it becomes easier to see them, to make out their thick olive-black backs and yellow undersides. There must be six or seven, sleek and shiny.

  I’m going to catch one, says Leon.

  Yeah, let’s. Stefan is excited at the suggestion.

  Let’s, I agree.

  Without thinking twice, without considering the consequences of what we’re doing, or how deep the water might be, the three of us jump in fully clothed.

  The bottom of the creek is soft, muddy. The water reaches our waist. Straightaway it has an “off” smell and tastes like there’s something dead in it.

  Yuck! I cry. Whose stupid idea was it to jump in?

  You wanted to, says Stefan.

  Who cares about a bit of stinking mud? asks Leon. I’m going to catch an eel. Watch an expert!

  He takes a few steps forward, to the middle of the creek, and disappears under water.

  Hell! Stefan is screaming.

  Leon’s drowned! I’m screaming. Help! Let’s get help! What if he’s dead already?

  We know that none of us can swim. We’re starting to panic. What can we do?

  Bubbles are rising where Leon disappeared. Water is moving around, like an undercurrent is churning it. Like it’s about to erupt.

  Leon suddenly surfaces ahead of us, arms waving madly, half dog-paddling, half swimming, legs kicking. He is spitting water and mud, coughing, crying, but getting closer to the bank and scrambles up when he does. He clutches at clumps of weeds and just flops there, exhausted, breathing heavily.

  We wade over to him, taking big strides, then we haul ourselves up next to him, trying not to upset him. He keeps his eyes closed tightly.

  No one speaks. Leon is the strong one in our group. He can punch and wrestle like nobody else. To see him lying there on the grass — breathless, trying hard to stop crying, his sandals full of black mud that’s running on to the grass — is an embarrassment that Stefan and I will never speak about to anyone else.

  I look down at my ankles and scream as loudly as my lungs will allow. At the same time I brush and scrape at my legs as if they are on fire.

  What’s wrong with you? Stefan yells.

  Leeches! I scream.

  Now we are all wiping our legs, arms, bodies. We’ve had experiences with these bloodsuckers before and they really are harmless, but they are horrible to look at — fat, bloated, almost round, like slugs, once they’ve feasted on your blood, before they drop off. The leeches that live in Duck Creek are black with brown stripes and brown underbellies. They attach themselves so you feel nothing; but finding them unexpectedly, like now, produces a fright.

  The sun continues blazing down on our heads. The three of us smell like mud, and the bush buzzes with the sound of insects and birds whose life we have disturbed. Our shanghais and Stefan’s bow lie beside us. Sparrows are hopping down the creek bank. The creek surface is still once more and there’s no sign of the eels.

  When I was underwater, says Leon, I caught hold of an eel. God, it was slippery.

  Lucky you, says Stefan.

  Lucky me? laughs Leon. I nearly drowned. What am I going to tell my parents?

  Tell them you slipped into the water, says Stefan.

  Yep, I say. Me too.

  Okay, says Stefan. That’s our plan. No one’s going to know the truth.

  Have the eels gone? asks Leon.

  All gone, I say.

  Weren’t they great to watch? he asks.

  Sure were, says Stefan.

  We lie there, the mud hardening on our clothes and skin. We make small talk, but it is important because we have to make Leon feel good again. We have taken off our clothes and sandals and hung them on branches. We lie in the sun, oblivious to each other’s nakedness.

  Wanna go back? I ask when I feel the moment is right.

  God, I stink, says Leon.

  We all do, I say, but it doesn’t matter. A bath will take care of that quick smart.

  Okay, says Stefan, and jumps up. Let’s hit the track.

  But get dressed first, says Leon. We don’t want to run into any girls.

  Or old Ma Cutler, I say.

  Wouldn’t that give her a shock? asks Stefan. Seeing our dicks.

  She’d die from shock, says Leon.

  How about those eels? I say. Weren’t they whoppers?

  Always are, says Stefan, as if he’d been catching them all his life. The creek’s full of them. You’re lucky one didn’t bite you on the bum.

  We laugh like idiots. There’s nothing in the world to worry about. Leon didn’t drown. That’s all that matters.

  We continue laughing as we squeeze into clothes and sandals that aren’t quite dry and we pocket our shanghais. Stefan shoulders his bow like a real Indian would.

  Returning from New Africa we are the heroes, the explorers who have discovered the secret place of eels. This will be our brag for the week, or even the month, until we venture further into the bush next time.

  The Holiday Outing

  The knock on my door is gentle, not too loud, but I’m awake and responding already to its message by leaping out of bed and getting dressed hurriedly. It’s half-past five!

  Ready, Peter?

  Coming, Dad!

  Breakfast’s ready.

  Our rooster crows in the chookshed in the far corner of the backyard.

  A magpie releases its liquid song somewhere in the bushes behind our house.

  A dog barks.

  Sparrows chirp in the gutters.

  A train rumbles in the near distance on the line between Regents Park and Sefton.

  When these sounds start to filter into the house I know that dawn is breaking.

  The reading lamp on the desk next to my bed fills the room with an eerie half-light and creates enormous shadows. It’s like being in the room with ghosts that are also giants, with heavy shoulders, huge backs; their heads are domed-shaped rocks, moving about, watching me.

  My father is a punctual man, very strict in his sense of duty. There is a routine to be followed from the moment he gets up to the moment he steps out the front gate. If he is late getting to the railway station he will miss the train. If he misses the train he will miss the bus connection at the other end of the line; then he will be late for work. That is not an option, certainly not because of a ten-year-old child. Son or no son, he will not be late for work. He uses the expression Moja służba, which means “my duty” in Polish, when referring to his work. He regards work as a responsibility and duty, and nothing deters him from that attitude. He never uses “sickies” to miss work — and he never misses work.

  In the kitchen my mother is preparing breakfast. Normally Dad prepares his own breakfast and is gone before Mum and I are up, but this outing was promised to me a long time ago, as a present for my birthday. I am on school holidays and must be on my best behaviour. I must not get in anybody’s way, must do exactly as I’m told and not embarrass my father. That’s the bargain. If I break the rules, I’ll never be allowed on such an excursion again.

  Eat well, says my mother. You can’t travel on an empty stomach.

  She has set out a bowl of two Weet-Bix, warm milk, bread and butter, salt, a bowl of sugar. Eggs are boiling in a saucepan on the stove.

  My father is already eating, has half finished his meal. Before he goes to work each morning, he fills an old dented aluminium basin with water for the c
hooks in their enclosure and puts out their feed in wooden troughs that he’s built; this includes wheat and “mash”, a mixture of a bran-like substance and water. If there are greens, leftovers from the garden, like lettuce or cabbage leaves, he throws in those also. A small door at the bottom of one of the walls connects the chookhouse to the yard and he opens it. At night, when the hens and rooster return to their perches, the small door is closed.

  My father returns from his outdoor chores and I’m finished and waiting, my coat buttoned. Before stepping out, I kiss my mother goodbye.

  On the back steps, Bobby, my dog, is madly wagging his tail. He must think he’s being taken for a walk. He looks up into my eyes expectantly and I pat him, ruffle his coat and tell him I’ll see him this afternoon.

  For a long moment I shiver, remembering the warmth of the eiderdown and wishing I was back under it. This is only the end of autumn, the May holidays, but the weather is cold. The air is damp and attaches itself to my face. Warm air condenses. Small clouds of breath drift into the morning light and disappear. The spell of sleep has been broken and a different one cast. There’s a scent of freshness in the garden that is a combination of fruit trees, vegetables and damp earth. I breathe it in, especially the scent of those trees closest to the house — lemon, mandarin, plum, apple. The deeper the breath I take, the more eager I become about setting out. It’s like the garden is giving me extra strength. I hear sparrows at the back fence, near where the chooks are scratching in the soil of their enclosure. For some strange reason I think about people dying, but I push the thought out of my mind.

  Morning is weaving its invisible scarves of light around two figures about to leave their home before the sun has broken through the clouds. They are two ghosts materialising with the shrouded morning light. The grass is wet and their shoes have left imprints on it.

  My father kisses my mother goodbye and I hurry after him.

  The walk to the railway is a brisk one: six or seven minutes and we’re there, with minutes to spare before the “All Stations To Liverpool” comes rumbling in from Berala. There are other early-morning workers standing and waiting on both sides of the platform, mostly men, some smoking, some reading newspapers. My father and I don’t say much. I watch as he positions us at a certain point along the platform, because, as he explains, This way we will be near the ticket barrier at Liverpool. That station will be busy.

  The train, a suburban “red rattler” — so called because of its colour and the noisy way it shakes when in motion — arrives and we sit on the right-hand side of the carriage facing each other, mostly in silence, until my father takes out his pouch of Jubilee, a tobacco with which he rolls his own cigarettes. This is what it must be like when he’s alone. Mum doesn’t like him smoking; she says it’s not good for his health and won’t allow him to smoke in the house. The cigarette smoke affects her breathing badly. This morning it’s different, however — this morning it’s just the two of us; two men going off to work. He lights up and blows blue cigarette smoke into the air. He crosses his legs and asks, as if he’s read my mind, Well, how do you feel about being a working man?

  I’m not like you, Dad.

  This will be good for you.

  Why?

  You’ll see what happens after school — how people have to work to make a living. This is a different part of life from what you are used to seeing.

  The sky is streaked with an overcast yellow. The sun is now rising slowly behind clouds as if does not want to emerge from behind a haze. Streetlights are still on. Houses have their blinds and curtains drawn.

  The train is travelling along the south-western line, through Sefton, Chester Hill, Villawood, towards Cabramatta and Liverpool. From there we will catch a bus out to Green Valley where my father is part of a Water Board road gang putting in pipes for water and sewage in the suburbs being built on the outskirts of what is known as the Sydney Metropolitan Area. Apart from working on a dairy farm at Ingleburn when we first arrived in Australia, this is the only work my father has done. A working-class man, he has only known farming and manual labour all his adult life.

  How much longer, Dad?

  Warwick Farm is next, then Liverpool, then the bus for fifteen minutes.

  I’ve watched him adjust his Akubra hat a few times and each time he does it he looks at his reflection in the window. He is not a vain man but it seems to me that this part of his clothing is important to him. He also runs his hand over his face and rubs it, as if checking that he’s shaved.

  The roofs of suburban houses rush past us, red terracotta tiles on the mostly fibro cottages. The backyards of these fibro homes have an outside toilet or “dunny” and smoke rises from some chimneys. There are garages and sheds in the backyards, rusting shells of cars on blocks, the occasional set of children’s swings, a sandpit, dogs chained to kennels, vegetable gardens where choko vines and convulvulus trail over fences and incinerators are made from forty-four-gallon drums.

  A feeling of intense interest in my father comes over me between the last two railway stations. For a quick moment I look at him and feel like my mind is spinning backwards, like it’s going into a deep funnel, through grey shades, until it’s all black; but there’s also a light in the darkness and that light is the knowledge of something very private, something I never speak about. This is the memory that I’ve lived with all my remembered life, the one I’ve never told anybody about, a memory of coming into the world. How can I say to anybody — or even my mother — that I remember being in the womb and what it was like being born? Or to my father, Feliks, who is not my biological father, that I have these glimpses of dark and light, of pressure and pain, of hearing a lot of crying and sobbing because my mother was by herself? Her crying was for a loneliness and pain I’ve never felt myself, and fear because the war had not ended at that stage and she was far from her home in the Ukraine; but it was a fear mixed with tears of joy, also, because she said that I was her own and nobody, nobody, would ever take me from her. She kept saying that over and over, all the time, even after the midwife arrived from across the valley and helped to “clean things up”, as my mother told me. This was the midwife who incorrectly registered my birth date and brought it a day forward, thereby making me a day older.

  I also remember two colours, yellow and green: a yellow like butter and a soft green like the leaves around a cob of corn. I associate these two colours with the room that I was born in. Once, when I mentioned this to my mother, she replied, No, that’s impossible! You had no way of knowing that! She brushed aside the conversation and never again did I mention the colours to her. In 1989, when I visited Germany and made contact with the family that my mother worked for during the war, I was taken to her living quarters in the barracks behind the steel-products factory that the family owned. There I received one of the biggest surprises of my life. As Fritz the owner pushed back the two sliding doors to reveal my mother’s quarters, there was the room that I was born in — and there were the walls, green and yellow, exactly as I’d remembered them. When I asked Fritz how long the walls had been like this, he replied that they hadn’t been changed since the war and, as long as he lived, they would stay the same. They have memories for me, he said. He said nothing more and walked away from the conversation.

  My father’s face comes into focus slowly, the features emerging into the light of the railway carriage, as if in a blur, discoloured by a haze of blue cigarette smoke and sunlight. I want to lean across and hug him and kiss him, say thank you for being who you are, for looking after Mum and me all these years and I hope that I make you proud of me. I like “Skrzynecki” as a surname even though there are boys at school and kids in the streets who make fun of it. He smells of cigarette smoke and Sunlight soap. His hands are rough and calloused, strong from doing outdoor work with a pick and shovel.

  Come on, says my father, we’re here. Time to go.

  My secret disappears into my mind and I hear my father’s words like a soft bell. Time to go. We stand u
p and he ushers me ahead of him. Through the window I glimpse the cream-coloured letters of the words “Liverpool Station” painted on a green seat just before people stream past and block my view.

  The Water Board site is a collection of machinery, a large crane, backhoes, compressors, pumps, jackhammers. Several tin sheds stand along one side and most of the men go in that direction. These are their quarters where they share their camaraderie, where they change into work clothes, where they wash and later dress for the return trip home. Around the rest of the perimeter there are steel and concrete pipes of different sizes stacked on top of one another, as are bags of cement. There are several mounds of blue metal and sand. Hoses run in all directions and water bubbles up from a pipe in the ground, forming puddles of creamy-brown sludge that looks like melted chocolate ice-cream with caramel topping. Picks and shovels stand against the sheds. The men who have changed into their work clothes wear overalls or old pants, old shirts, hats of different types. Most wear gumboots. Some speak in English — theirs are the nasal accents of the “dinkum Aussies”, the “True Blue” citizens of the country. Others speak in their mother tongues. I recognise Polish voices, an Italian, a German, a Russian. There are also Hungarians, Czechs, Yugoslavs. These are the “New Australians”, the imported manual labourers.

  We are heading in the direction of one of the sheds when a man comes running over and shakes my hand. Welcome, welcome! he says enthusiastically. My father steps back, almost as if he expected this display of exuberance. Even before we are introduced I know who he is. My parents have spoken about him many times. This is Harry Hamilton, the immigrant from Hungary who arrived in Australia a few years before us, a man who married an Australian woman and anglicised his name. A man who wishes to become a success in Australia and likes to impress people with his command of English. He still speaks a broken kind of English, however, and accentuates his vowels to sound educated, but his Ss come out like Zs, and as a result he sounds neither European nor Australian. Your father iz very proud of you, he beams, yez? You are clever at learning.