War

All week long I have dreamed swirling vistas of my past lives set before me in intimate detail, none of which I can hold onto now.

How I hate the way dreams evade me in the morning after I launch into the day.
How I hate the way they slip away, those many and exciting scenes that flew through my mind in the night while I was oblivious, unearthed, without body, merely a visual apparatus in my head that scanned the many scenes my unconscious laid out before me.

Events of the day meld with past events, old characters and new flit in and out, but I cannot hold onto the narrative of these past lives.

If only I could I would write out my dreams all day long. I would write into these fantastical stories to try to find some essence of who I am, of what I see and what I think, rather than feel so bogged down with intellectual artifice as I have felt this morning while trying to write into my father’s grief.

My father’s grief was a visceral thing. He wore it in the wrinkles on his forehead and in the stoop of his back.

He had been a replacement baby. His brother born before him bore the same name but was still born, leven los. No one talked about these things in those days.

What did my paternal grandmother do with her grief at the loss of this her first baby? Within a year she had another, a son, my father, who became her oldest followed closely by three others, one boy and two girls.

In the next generation I was born several years after the conclusion of the second world war on the other side of the world from where that war had been fought, but the legacy of this war leaked into my childhood memories like a religion.

As a child I knew there had been a terrible event called ‘the war’, a time of starvation and of cruelty, a time in which men killed other men, and people starved, a time when work was scarce and people froze.

No firewood for fires. Some tore up their floor boards, or chopped down street trees to make fires in the cold winter nights, until even these sources of fuel ran out.

The war seemed always to exist in my imagination during winter time, never in summer, but it ran on for years and years.

The whole of my first seven years on this earth we could have been at war at the kitchen table in Greensborough first where we lived and later in Camberwell. I was always waiting for a third world war. I still am.

Speak of war and grief seeps in, whether you fought in it or watched from a afar. War has long tentacles that reach far into the future.

The natives and the interlopers

They ripped down cottages to make way for an old people’s home. They gutted trees and bulldozed the land. Any pigeons that for years had lived in the topmost branches alongside the magpies and starlings moved on. The rats of the skies.

Now they line the telegraph wires along the side street beside my house. I see them in the mornings, lined up like soldiers, one by one, beaks burrowed into their chests, heads lowered, asleep or dozing or doing whatever it is that birds do when they are not in flight or scavenging.

By mid morning the pigeons move on, from the telegraph wire to my neighbour’s gutter. Or her television aerial. Their midmorning cooing is like velvet against the background blast of traffic from the street in front.

Awake now the pigeons peer into my back yard. I can see them edging closer. By lunchtime, they are ready for another rest. The gum tree in my backyard is forked. A runt of a tree, it should never have been allowed to sprout higher than a sapling, but it grew despite its crooked branches, like a misshaped tooth in an otherwise straight set of teeth, it grew at an angle, down and back into the soil where ants burrow to make nests.

Last summer the caterpillars hatched, yellow and white with orange tufts that flared along their backs. They stripped the gum of its leaves, stripped it of its strength, no flowers now, just half chewed leaves a resting board for the pigeons that line its bare branches in increasing numbers.

I tried once to count the pigeons, as if in counting them I could satisfy my belief that they have increased in number, that they have been breeding, that they have moved in from other places, maybe not only down the road but up the road as well where the bulldozers have moved in to make way for a new shopping centre, a new office complex.

The bulldozers have brought down more cottages since, ripped down more trees, taken over the homes of other birds.

I cannot hang out washing on the line any more, on any but the two outer lines on one side. It might seem a small thing to you, a trifle perhaps to find your washing smeared in the white brown sludge of bird poop, but for me it is a catastrophe.

I have lived in this house for many years. I have lived in this house, uninterrupted, and cared for my cats, my fish and birds. I have distributed birdseeds daily for the wattlebirds and sparrows, shooed away the greedy minor birds and kept my cats in at night.

By day I tell my cats to go after the birds. Go after them but discriminate. I tell my cats to discriminate between the natives and the interlopers. These pigeons must be culled. They have no place here.