Landing in Poland

My father and I had a curious relationship. Until yesterday, and I am 52, I had thought it contained no love at all. When I was very young I was aware there had been something like love, but as I grew older it evaporated: a steam of sentimentality boiled off as the lie of he and me, father-and-son, cleared to reveal a couple of inconveniently related men most happy when they were apart.

He had a fondness for puppets, robots and that kind of thing. Soulless mechanical toys that paced through life as relentlessly as he did; there was a horrible, unfathomable energy to them, as if each had a strange heart to it. I found him and them unstoppable. Nothing would get in the way of him saying whatever he wanted to say. Not me, for sure, nor a searching for the right words. He spoke poor English, regularly lapsing into Polish or sometimes just awful, animalic sounds as he shouted at me.

He was a frightening, noise-producing thing: a beehive or an alarm clanging on the wall, or a siren screaming. There didn’t seem to be any background to him beyond the kind of background you’d give a hive (bees) or an alarm (in those days, Made in Hong Kong). I couldn’t find a clue to what he was thinking and why.

It felt as if he wasn’t born anywhere, more as if he had been made, made in Poland, and what on earth was that? His father, some kind of wealthy Polish newspaper baron born in the 1850s, looked like an even more irascible and bloody-minded version of him. All I knew of his mother I drew from a photograph of my father kissing her – kissing her desperately, when he was a middle-aged man and she was very old, and kissing her unlike she was his mother.

Ideas?

I looked for thoughts, beliefs, the qualities I had found in writing, in characters and in scenes in books, that might show I was in the presence of a living, proper man rather than a frightening machine. But he behaved as automatically as his toys.

Where was the thought? Emotions seemed to come to him as they would to an animal and he’d usually have lashed out or moved on, literally