IN CURTAIN SQUARE, the neighbourhood park, stand two rows of Moreton Bay figs, six sentinels on either side of a path. ‘They are grand old beauties’, father tells me. He taps them with his fists. ‘Rock hard’, he pronounces. ‘Each one is a sculpture, a unique individual. Each one bears its own character, its own being’, he enthuses. ‘They cling to the earth with their many roots exposed, like snakes slithering into burrows.’
Father asks me to count the roots extending from the largest tree. There are over twenty. ‘See how they unite into a thick trunk which gives way to a spacious dome’, he points out. ‘Observe how the branches reach for the horizons. The smooth surfaces of their leaves mirror the sun and stay evergreen. They are as grand as the chestnut trees I knew in Bialystok.’
He has known these Moreton Bay figs for over forty years, though it is only recently that I have become aware of this ‘love affair’, as he calls it. During the earlier years, when the tension had been greatest, they had become his refuge, his private temples. He would come here at night and sit beneath them, as he had sat beneath the chestnut tree of Zwierziniec in the early years of this century. A man broken in spirit can pass by them and be comforted’, father claims.
There is a certain position, by the kitchen table, from which a window high on the wall opposite the bathroom can be seen. Here mother often sits and gazes at the upper branches of a tree. Timber frames divide the window into twelve separate squares, so that the light streams in at many angles and degrees of intensity. Sometimes it is restrained, the branches barely visible. At other moments it blazes a luminous gold. In winter the branches are thin and bare, while in spring they erupt with leaves. In her ageing, mother’s life has been reduced to a simple equation, a silence with infinite variations on tranquillity and light — concentrated, framed, contained, yet full of subtle movement and change.
The silence is rarely broken, except for a sudden gust of wind, the distant barking of a dog, the twittering of birds. ‘They return every year’, mother announces from one of her reveries. ‘Birds can speak’, she adds. ‘They have a language of their own. They probably talk about where they have been for the past year. They perch on that tree and chatter to each other. You can hear how pleased they are to be back.’
‘The whole of existence is contained in words’, father claims. ‘Words are the source. They are more durable than the grass we are sitting on’, he stresses, while poking his fingers at the ground. ‘This grass must eventually fade, whereas words eternalise our experiences and express the sum total of what we have been in our lives. Words will never die, so long as there are human beings to receive them. All our knowledge and feelings can thereby be retrieved.’
Father is now fully in his element, spinning a long thread of thought to which he clings with tenacity so that it will not escape his grasp. ‘Of course there are words which bind us to prejudice and blind faith’, he stresses. ‘Such words must be stripped naked, so that we can find our way back to the pure meaning of things, to words which do not dictate our lives and condition our thoughts’
As father talks his whole being is in harness. ‘Words will always triumph’, he asserts. ‘I am talking of words that express our innermost feelings. In words lie their potential to break out and be released.’ As he makes this claim, father’s voice falters and gives way to tears. But, as usual, he fights them off before they overwhelm him. Yet in that moment we had both glimpsed and felt that which cannot be captured in words.
But, of course, father tries. He tells me that in his tears he had sensed both his greatest happiness and regret. Happiness, because he had realised that, at last, he had been fully understood. His words had been received. Regret, because he knows that soon he must leave this world he has come to love so dearly. And, he concedes, there are moments which move beyond words. ‘Perhaps this is what can be called a zisser toit, a sweet death’, he muses. ‘Perhaps this is what we are striving for after all — a silence, a zisser toit, beyond all memory and words.’
My earliest of memories: a rare gathering of relatives and Old World friends after a day of picnicking. I am feeling my way through a forest of legs. Smoke drifts down between the trees. As I crawl beside them, I come across a white object. I grasp it in my hands and weave my way through the forest until I find mother. She bends over, lifts me up, and carries me to the kitchen where she performs her feat of magic. She drops the dented ping-pong ball into a kettle of boiling water and, minutes later, it re-emerges, smooth, restored, fully rounded, a glowing white sphere.