SUNFLOWERS
‘The sunflowers looked at him rather than at the sun.’ Milorad Pavić
My father was a handsome and charming man. I say this as a matter of fact, not out of pride, or to claim any reflected glory, because my father cared very little about me. Throughout my childhood he rarely spoke to me, or to my sister Anna. But although he paid no attention to me, as a small boy I was always intensely aware of my father, who walked like a giant through my early life. And that awareness was greater because, as a consulting engineer, my father regularly worked at home, in one of the front rooms, which he had converted into his study.
This study was the warmest room in the house. It had three windows, including a wide bay window looking out to the street. Bookshelves covered two of its walls from floor to ceiling. There was a heavy walnut desk set across one corner, an inclined draughting table at which my father stood to work, and a dark green leather couch. I think, but I cannot say for certain, from time to time my father slept on that couch rather than go to the bedroom where my mother slept. There are many things in my childhood I now, with hindsight, think may have occurred, but which at the time I did not understand, did not know how to interpret, or perhaps simply refused to register.
The door of the study was always closed, whether my father was there or not, and my sister and I could not enter without permission. That rule came not from him, but from my mother, who spoke of the study as if it began with a capital letter. The air in there, too, was different to the air in the rest of the house; dry, faintly dusty, smelling of leather, sun-warmed even in winter. But within that sacrosanct room was something even more sacred, the walnut desk and, even more yet, its drawers. The desk was broad, with three or four drawers, bearing elaborately curled brass handles, arranged on either side of the chair.
I retain the knowledge, even the physical sensation, that these desk drawers were utterly forbidden from one particular event. I was six or seven years old. I had gone into the study, with permission from my mother, instructed to retrieve something, perhaps a coffee pot. My father was not there, and I had the idea he was out of the house. I took advantage of this rare opportunity to approach the desk – a stripe of sunlight was falling diagonally across the burgundy leather inlay on its top – and look inside its drawers. I stealthily slid out each drawer in turn, slowly, so my mother would not hear anything. I was too aware of the enormity of what I was doing to open them more than half-way.
I recall the smell of the drawers rather than their contents; a mixed smell of wood and pencil-shavings and ink. I am sure there were rulers and dividers and pens and rubber stamps and letterhead paper and so on; I cannot say I remember. But what I do remember is that, in one of the bottom drawers, in an unlocked metal box, I found a revolver. Startlingly black and shiny, it lay on a piece of green cloth. I took it out and looked at it carefully. I knew what it was; I had toy wooden guns, and one of my uncles had a cigar lighter made in the shape of a pistol. This then was the real version, the archetype, of a toy, and therefore a very wonderful toy indeed. I also understood it was a secret object, hidden, something I would never see on one of Father’s crammed bookshelves or lying on the desktop.
I remember the touch of the revolver even today, the hardness and surprising coldness of it, and its smell of oiled metal. It was fully loaded. I know that because I also remember the shiny brass firing caps of the bullets in their revolving chamber. It was heavy, far, far heavier than my wooden toy pistols. I had to use both hands to hold it steady out in front of me, pointing it at various things in the room; the lampshade, the telephone, the clock on the wall.
I was so caught up in amazement at this magical object that I forgot I was meant to get in and out of the study quickly. I was still standing in the middle of the room, holding the gun, when my father entered. I saw him come through the doorway, his shape filling most of it. I froze. I expected, no, I knew, I would be in terrible, unimaginable trouble for being in the study and touching his things. Especially this secret powerful thing. But my father smiled, and walked toward me with his hands held wide apart. He spoke to me – I suppose he said my name, though I can’t recall that – then reached out and very gently took the revolver out of my hand.
He put it down somewhere, then he took my arm, also gently, and we walked out of the study together. He closed the door; it seemed even more than usual a definitive shutting-off of that room from the rest of the house. I was astonished that he displayed no anger at all.
Once we were out in the living room he knelt on the carpet in front of me and put his hands on my shoulders. He looked me full in the face. I was startled, because he focussed his entire attention onto me, which he had never done before. I remember the feeling of that attention, I remember noticing his eyes were blue, which I can’t recall knowing at any other time, and I remember thinking whatever was to come, at least my father was fully aware of me. And then he spoke.
‘Martin, if you ever touch the drawers of my desk again, I will give you a thrashing you will never forget for your whole life. Do you understand me?’ His voice was not loud; indeed he spoke quietly, but it was compressed and forceful. Every word hit me like a blow. No, not a blow, that gives the wrong impression, because the effect was not brutal; every word was like an electric shock. Reinforced by the blaze of his blue eyes close to mine, eyes which suddenly seemed very large, huge, his words went straight into the centre of my being. I have heard them over again a thousand times since.
‘Yes, father,’ I answered. He nodded, stood up and walked away. I remember seeing his back as he went out of the living room, toward the kitchen. Standing, he was once again very big, very much taller than me. I heard him speaking to my mother, but I didn’t make out what was said. No doubt he was telling her what had happened – but no, as I write this I wonder whether my mother actually knew of the existence of the revolver. Perhaps he was just telling her he had found me in his study. Or perhaps something quite unrelated to me at all.
I ran to my room and sat on my bed, trembling. I resolved that I would never touch his desk again. I intended absolutely to obey my father, but more, I wanted him to see that I obeyed him, that I was capable of discipline. ‘In a year from now,’ I thought, ‘he will see I have not touched his desk for a year, and he will be proud of me.’ Proud of me? No, I didn’t think that, to be honest. ‘He will acknowledge I have obeyed his instructions,’ is what I actually thought, because that was how I thought of my relationship with my father.
It’s funny; I always called him ‘Father,’ which even in those days was a very old-fashioned form of address. My mother at one time encouraged Anna and me to call him ‘Dad’ – we called her ‘Mum’ – but the first time I said it to him, he lowered the newspaper he was reading, looked at me, then raised the paper again without answering. The next time I addressed him, I called him ‘Father’ again, and he responded.
I realise my account of these incidents makes him sound hard, or callous. He was not. He threatened me, that once, with a thrashing, but he never actually punished me throughout my entire childhood, never even raised his voice to me. He fundamentally had no interest in me. I couldn’t understand that then; I thought parents had to be interested in their children, because they had created them. My sister and I were aware of our mother’s attention to us in a thousand ways. But having no interest in us, and no instinctive sense of how to deal with us, our father adopted – heaven knows where he acquired it, probably from his own father, now I think of it – a completely formulaic way of relating to his children, and left it at that. I dimly understood he was not very interested in my mother, either, although even that understanding is perhaps overlaid with my perception as an adult, and in the light of what happened later.
I wanted my father to like me, of course, partly because he was my father, but also because he was the largest thing in my world; a big man, certainly, but when to his size you added his deep voice, his cigars and hair-oil and heavy square-shouldered overcoat and highly-polished shoes, his Horch touring car, his rolled-up blueprints and his leather document-case, to me he had the size and gravity of a mountain.
And it was not merely physical size; he embodied authority, in the home but also in the world. I observed – I watched surreptitiously when clients came to our house – that men, well-dressed men, some in uniform, who arrived in shiny black cars with drivers who opened the door for them, treated him with deference. Mother frequently told us Father was a very important man, usually in the course of telling us he was not to be disturbed at a given moment. And he spoke about powerful people dismissively – not the empty, boastful criticism of the weak, but as from a position of strength. ‘Woyzeck is a fool, and I didn’t hesitate to tell him so,’ I heard him say to my mother once on returning home from a meeting of some kind. Woyzeck was Doctor Julius Woyzeck, whom I knew from school lessons to be our Governor. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Father had said exactly that to him.
My father was certainly attractive. I mean that literally; people were attracted to him, as if he were a magnet. In any group, he always seemed to be in the middle, with everyone else’s eyes on him, and it was the same in every photograph of him I saw. I took it to be natural, as his right.
He once told us he had acted in plays at university, and that sometimes he wished he had become an actor. I remember him saying this, sitting at the head of the table just before dinner one evening, with a silver soup tureen in front of him, and a white napkin tucked into his collar. I remember because it seemed a remarkable confession from my father; it amounted to saying he’d made a mistake, or had a regret, neither of which were things I could associate with him. I always believed him to be master of his whole life. But perhaps his youthful theatrical training had proved useful, teaching him to command the stage, to time the delivery of his words for maximum effect.
I did see some evidence of my father’s theatrical abilities. My mother regularly held musical recitals in our home, to which friends and neighbours were invited. They were conducted in the parlour, a big room with yellow striped wallpaper. It contained an upright piano and a number of chairs, covered in red plush, which were used only for these salons. My mother would play piano, Schubert and Mozart, and a neighbour, a small man with glasses whose name I have forgotten, played violin, I believe very capably. My father did not always attend, but when he did, he sang Lieder, with my mother as accompanist, or read from Goethe, usually Faust. Listening to someone read doesn’t sound very exciting, but – I think this is an accurate memory – people always attended to him expectantly and in silence. He read accurately and resonantly, without exaggeration or affectation.
From the age of about eight I was allowed to attend these soirees, sitting behind all the guests on a single straight-backed chair near the door; Anna, three years younger, was not, a source of pain to her even in her adult life. ‘You’re so lucky,’ she said to me several times, on one occasion close to tears. ‘You can remember more of him than I. I never got to see him sing, or read, or anything. I wish I had.’ I did not disturb her assumption that I welcomed these memories.
These evenings were my mother’s only public appearance, and perhaps her greatest pleasure. She set out an elaborate table, with a variety of food and drink. Tokay wine I remember particularly, because I was fascinated by the improbable Hungarian words on the label, but there were no doubt other drinks, as I recall light reflecting from crystal decanters, and there were certainly little pies and pastries, rolls, cheese and smoked meat, cakes of different kinds, jellied fruits and bowls of wrapped sweets. After the music, there was coffee and animated conversation, often until late. And I noticed, in that more relaxed atmosphere, that women paid attention to my father, and he responded to them. In those days, women dressed colourfully, or at least that is my memory; standing round my father like flowers planted around a monument, they turned their faces to him as sunflowers to the sun.
On these evenings I saw a side of my father I saw at no other time; smiling, his dark eyebrows mobile, his white teeth flashing. There were jests and repartee. I even saw him clap a man on the shoulder, laughing, although I don’t remember ever seeing anyone touch him so familiarly. But my predominant memory of those evenings is of women finding my father entertaining, attractive, I’d say now. If it was obvious to me, it must have been even more obvious to my mother, but I didn’t think of that at the time.
And I remember that after these salons, when all the guests had gone, I would secretly – why I thought it had to be secretly I don’t exactly know – slip back into the parlour, where I could smell women’s perfume, several different perfumes, it seemed, mingled with wine and stale cigarette smoke. I associated this sweet, almost sickly, scent, hanging in the warm, tired air of the room, with something forbidden. Again, I may be overlaying that memory now with hindsight. But the contrast between my father’s behaviour on those evenings and his conduct in the home all the rest of the time was very marked.
Our father’s indifference to his children affected my sister more than me. I was at boarding school from the age of twelve, went to Vienna immediately on passing my baccalaureate, and for ten years after that had no contact with my father. I had to find other role models. But Anna stayed at home, attending a local day-school, and all through her adolescence had to bear his disregard. From what little she has told me, that disregard, to her and our mother, if possible increased over the last three or four years before he finally left the family. And of course as a daughter, Anna naturally craved her father’s attention and affection, and was the more distressed when she didn’t receive it.
Indeed, I don’t doubt our father’s inattention to her affected Anna’s life profoundly. After finishing school, she remained living with my mother into her late twenties, until she went to Leonding to be married to a man I didn’t know, and as I understand it she scarcely knew either. Three years later, the marriage having failed, she returned home to Linz and lived with my mother again until she bought a small apartment in the Franckviertel district. There she retreated into deeper and deeper layers of secrecy and incommunicability.
But this is not a story about Anna, or about me. It is about my father.
As I say, he left the family. I was seventeen then. It was during the school term, so I was not at home when he departed. I received a letter from my mother, telling me in two dry, matter-of-fact pages that my father had met someone else, that she had agreed not to contest a divorce, that we would be moving out of our villa into a smaller house Father had bought, and that he had already left for Graz, to live with the woman who was to be his next wife. At the end of term I went home, or rather to my mother’s new house, small but pleasant, with a well-tended garden, and found my books and childhood toys packed up in boxes. I left them there when I went back to school; I never retrieved them.
The way I have described my father’s leaving sounds absurdly simple and unemotional, but that is how it appeared to me at the time. Now, of course, I know it was far from simple and unemotional for my mother, who, quite apart from any interior pain, felt publicly shamed. Nor was it so for my sister. But at the time I simply accepted the constellations had rearranged. I didn’t attempt to contact my father in Graz – after all, he hadn’t even told me he was leaving – and he didn’t contact me. I finished school, enrolled in university, and went on to try and shape my own life, relying on my own resources. Of course I made mistakes, but I also learned, quickly enough, what life required of me.
And I rather looked down on my university colleagues who spoke about their parents, or quoted their father’s opinions; I considered them undeveloped, immature. Surely at twenty, I thought, you had to put your parents behind you. Perhaps for that reason I formed few friendships there. I applied myself to my studies and graduated with a good degree in law. I inherited none of my father’s musical ability, but I did achieve a reasonable proficiency at chess. With those qualifications I set out to establish myself in the world.
It was a decade later than this that I saw my father again. He must have been nearly sixty. This was just after the Anschluss, about two years before the war. I had established my law practice in Vienna, had a position in well-established chambers, and was, if I may say so, regarded as up-and-coming.
Returning from court one afternoon I was given a note, in copperplate handwriting I recognised as my father’s. He wrote that he was staying at the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth, and asked if it would be convenient for him to visit me the next day. Even then, already an adult professional, the idea of my father asking if something suited me struck me as strange. I sent a telegram suggesting eleven o’clock.
I had a good deal of work to do that evening, but I was continually distracted by the prospect of my father’s impending visit. Of course, I could imagine him only as I’d last seen him, and I visualised a man a head and a half taller than me striding through my door the next morning. Why he wanted to see me, and what I would say to him, were equally unguessable. That night I even dreamed of his visit; he was wearing a chalk-striped Italian overcoat which I remembered from my boyhood. In my sleep I could smell his hair oil.
The next morning, I reassured myself that my anxiety was baseless; my father was just another man, whatever position he might hold. I was used to dealing with people in authority, and indeed was now a man with some degree of authority myself.
I know that in the conventional father-son story, I would have found my father, on meeting him again after fifteen years, smaller, less impressive. He would have had some reversal of fortune, and would perhaps ask me for a favour, for legal advice, possibly even a loan. Or again, he might look at me pensively and say, ‘I haven’t been much of a father to you, have I?’ And I would forgive him, we might even embrace, and then we would each go on our way having dealt with the father-son problem to finality. That is what occurs in the conventional narrative. But it wasn’t like that at all.
At precisely eleven, he was announced. He came through the door of my chambers, still wearing his hat and overcoat, making both the doorway and my whole room seem small. When I stood to greet him I saw we were now the same height, but the impression of his size did not abate. From his outward appearance, he was an even more important man than before. His suit was immaculately tailored, his tiepin diamond, and he wore a small gold Hakenkreuz badge in his lapel.
He looked around my rooms, the walls full of books, the heavy desk, the Persian carpet, the leather client chairs, and nodded. He tossed his overcoat and hat onto one chair, and sat heavily in the other, across the desk from me. Not knowing what else to say, I began to tell him about my practice, and he nodded from time to time, but nevertheless seemed to be only half listening.
It struck me forcefully that I felt nothing on seeing my father. Absolutely nothing, neither fear nor affection, nor nostalgia for my childhood, nor even curiosity about his life and occupation. I was no more engaged in talking to him than I would have been speaking to a reporter, or some uncle of a colleague. After all my concerns of the night before, now that he was here, my father’s visit seemed no more than a formality to be dealt with. I even began to calculate how soon I could get back to my work. I realised I still didn’t know why he had come, but I decided whatever it was, it could have nothing really to do with me.
‘Yes, I see you have done well for yourself, Martin,’ he said when I came to a pause, and while at one time in my life those words would have meant the world to me, I took nothing from them now. In fact, I bridled at the idea that my reason for being a lawyer was to do well for myself.
‘If I’ve done well, Father, as you’re pleased to say, it’s because I work hard, and because I try to give a voice to those who need it, who have no voice of their own,’ I said. Finally allowing myself to feel annoyed with him, and caught up in my own rhetoric, I went on:
‘You wouldn’t know this about me, but I actually believe in fairness, in justice. And I do my best to see it’s brought about.’
My father smiled, and shook his head slightly. He leaned forward in his chair and looked at me directly; I couldn’t remember him looking straight into my eyes since that day, more than twenty years before, when he’d found me in his study.
‘Martin,’ he said, then, pausing between each word, ‘life is not like that.’ Still smiling, he leant back again, gesturing dismissively with one hand.
‘Life does not balance its books. There is no higher ledger recording right and wrong. I know you are a lawyer and I am not, but let me tell you, there is no justice in this world. Your scrabbling around trying to see what you call justice done is about as important to the real world as a tadpole swimming in a puddle. I understand how you think, Martin, because most people think like you. Be honest, before I arrived you were entertaining some thoughts of forgiving me, weren’t you? The truth is you could not forgive me even if you really desired to. You don’t have what forgiveness requires. Only the strong can forgive, and that strength comes from the exercise of power, not from good intentions, or a diploma.’
Before I could compose a retort, he stood, raked his fingers through his hair, still glossy and black, put on his hat, and picked up his overcoat.
‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m glad you’ve had success. You have ability, I’m sure you do work hard, and hard work and ability will usually find their reward. D’you smoke cigars? No? A pity; I brought you a box of real Fonsecas. Never mind, I’ll put them to good use,’ he said, patting his breast pocket. Smiling again, he held out his hand. I shook it, for the first and last time in my adult life, a strong, warm grip. Then he left.
After he had gone, I realised I had no idea why he had come. He had asked me nothing, and told me nothing about himself. I could only assume he’d wanted to see whether I had so far succeeded in life, but why? Out of some belated sense of paternal pride, or to assuage his conscience for abandoning me, abandoning his family? Or for some other reason entirely; perhaps to see if I could be useful to the new Europe?
Whatever its purpose, my father’s visit profoundly disconcerted me. Once I had subdued my anger at his contemptuous dismissal of my beliefs, his assertion that justice was unimportant troubled me in another way; it left me fearful for the future, as my father was obviously very close to those who shaped the events of the world. If this emerging world was to be one without justice, without compassion, I trembled for it. Only the next day, back in court, did I recover some of my self-assurance, but even then, his words still resonated disturbingly.
The war came, of course, and interrupted everyone’s lives. I served, was injured – not heroically but in an artillery training accident – and returned to civilian life. The years immediately after the war in Austria are not worth speaking about, except that my mother died, knocked down by a Russian jeep when crossing the road in front of her house. I found it harder and harder to resist my father’s assertion that there is in this life no justice. Nevertheless, the structure of things slowly returned toward something like normality.
I had no news of my father during the six years of the war. I assumed he was involved in some way, probably in some engineering project that didn’t bring his name into the news. It may seem odd that I didn’t try to find out, then or later, but the fact was I had spoken to him only once in the last twenty years, and the war and its aftermath gave me a great deal more to be concerned with than inquiring after a man I hardly knew, even if he were my father.
I do know that he survived the war, because once, just once, I heard from him again. I had settled back into my law practice, and the courts were operating as before, so it must have been ten years after our last meeting. I had married and had a son and daughter of my own by that time, and to be honest I thought as little about my childhood and family as possible.
But I definitely remember this final communication from him. Although I can’t be certain of the year, the day remains in my memory, because it was one of those glaring, brassy late August days when everybody in Vienna is thoroughly sick of the summer heat and wishes to heaven autumn would arrive. Even in my rooms, with an electric fan going, my shirt collar was sticking uncomfortably to my neck.
An envelope arrived for me bearing my father’s immediately recognisable handwriting. It had no return address, but bore an American stamp and a Chicago postmark. Inside was a card, with an inscription wishing me a happy birthday, signed ‘Your Father.’
My birthday is, in fact, in November. I dropped the envelope and card into the waste paper basket at my feet. At home that evening, I saw no reason to mention the matter to my wife.
I have not heard from my father, or about him, again. Whether his being in America proves there is justice in the world or not, I cannot say. As I am now sixty, he must almost certainly have passed on, but I have no idea where or when or how. I prefer not to think of my father at all. I have only set down this account to put it behind me, in the hope I do not have to think about him again. But he was, I have to say, the most handsome and charming man I ever knew.