Vera by Wasowski Vera; Hillman Robert;

Author:Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

This is a different way of looking at those who can fly – those whom my friend in Warsaw praises. It is only when they are airborne that they come fully to life, and show their majesty.

In the Australia that I will come to know, how Baudelaire’s view of the poet will be mocked, or if not the poet, then all those winged ones who stumble when they alight on a deck with their broad wings dragging.

Look now at the creature. It is a god.

The albatross changes direction after a time and soars away towards the sun. When he is no more than a black speck, I return to Anna.

‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Is this true? We are a happy family, Marek and Jan and I, but we are not like any other happy family I have ever known. There is no sex; the mother is an acknowledged failure at motherhood; the child prefers an alcoholic journalist to his own Mamele. But we are happy enough.

Australia is over the horizon. In four more days, we will stop at a city by the name of Fremantle, before we go under the bottom of the continent and dock at Melbourne.

Australia, may I introduce my happy family. I bring you gifts: my clever brain, Jan’s writing, Marek’s sunny disposition. Also some less-welcome cargo stored in a dark cellar of my memory. Germans in black uniforms and polished boots that come up almost to their knees. A line of small children stands before the Germans. The officer in black points with his finger at one child, then another, another, and many more. He says, ‘Dieser Mann … das Mädchen … Dieser Junge …’ He does not point at me. I am not in the line of children. I am hidden away.

But I am watching.

It is the watching that I bring with me.

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