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I thought the month of February would never end. No stars, no clarity. Just wind pushing the clouds and trees and fences. All month I dreamt about my father. Waking up I’d imagine his train pulling out of Warsaw nearly half a century ago — just in time as the uniformed official ran along the platform shaking papers at him. Zygmunt was there as well, both of them pretending it was just a business trip. I tried to imagine the expression on my father’s face as he gazed out through the train window. You and me, we made up the night before I left. I wished we’d done it sooner. Sadie hopped downstairs in her pyjamas, laughed at me wearing my big black coat so I hugged her tight, even though I wasn’t going to be away for long. You kissed me, drove me to the station, but wouldn’t lend me your gloves when I realised I’d forgotten mine. It wasn’t until much later you said you’d wanted to hang on to every thing, even that spare pair of brown, suede gloves you keep in the car.
Enough potatoes for a stew, feathers to fill an eiderdown.
Glinting in your palm two Krugerrands. Only a baby — premature;
just under the weight of her one breast. That's what
remains of you, she said, a kilogram of ash.
As far as the fresh fish stall but not all the way to Maroccos and that’s on a good day. Most of the dishes, but not the soup pan or teacups. Acts One and Two, home to bed before Act Three. Three quarters of the way to an orgasm and then, what? Sixty seven point five minutes of a football match but absolutely no chance of penalties. Gaps in a jigsaw sky, where blue pieces are missing. Painting the walls, no corners. Mowing most of the lawn but not that last strip.
Doctors advise patients recovering from M.E. to do seventy five per cent of what they would normally expect to do and then stop to rest.
He cracked them in half turning the shells in his large hands into small boats, with match stick masts and paper sails. They floated bobbing up and down in the sink or bath, sometimes capsized. Perhaps he also told stories about his father making boats out of walnut shell for him.
After all this time, I still don’t know how to talk to him. We speak about clutch cables or compressor valves. He gives good advice about plumbing more rarely bad advice about love. He tries to head me off, to warn me against taking any risk, he who followed Mama and us across the Iron Curtain, never to see his own father again. His heavy hands on my shoulders, push me out to sail away and hold me back, both at once.
These days he forgets most of what we say, but not everything. When I visit we sit round the same table he still cracks walnuts open passing me broken pieces to eat. But sometimes he manages to pull out a whole half creamy coloured and perfectly formed all crinkly and brand new. Silently he hands me a hard nut heart.
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