My father, all composed and tanned against his white suit jacket and soft blue tie, my father with his stories. In a succession of grey corporate cars driving across the city, across the top of a sanded down dinner table and fruit paintings on table mats, my father beginning stories. We walked across the hill to the garden party, where children ran around in period costume. We walked the hill, the hill with dark half forgotten moon light or anxious light streaming amber and strange. It was mid afternoon and everything was at a stately organized time on Sunday, a tray of carefully placed profiteroles and a bottle of pinot gris, my leather shoes with new pebbles collecting on the soles. As we walked, the heat caused a film of sweat to form behind our backs, but not on our faces.
I had to go sort out some problem or other at a job, my father began his story.
The man who owned the property had some grapevines on the front of his property and I half jokingly said to him he had some sort of vineyard. He agreed, and took me to the back of his house where he had a reasonable amount of vines. The man spoke with an East European accent which I found out was Hungarian, and I said to him how interesting it was he was Hungarian and whether he had seen the film "Gloomy Sunday." The man looked at me with this face.
At this point my father looked at me in this face, he can have a serious face when he tries and my father put this on now as well as a Hungarian accent.
"We do not like this film"
My father, who affected a sort of polite confusion, questioned why, and the Hungarian explained:
"It is a film about the Jews, we do not like the Jews. They lie."
My father, at this point, was offended.
"The Jews, they are always lying. First they are communists, then they are capitalists. But always they are liars."
At this point the story ended. My father and I kept walking up the hill. We walked a path that leads down the hill and then up a lane that cuts through to Saint Andrews Hill. There is the Mount Pleasant Presbyterian Church which has an organ, and the Mount Pleasant Anglican Church, which has bells which used to ring on Sunday but now are silent. The party was filled with suburban middle class people, my father talked printing business with a thick necked gentleman with a serious chin and an avian wife who stood by his side in a relationship like those african birds that rely on larger mammals for food. Mutually beneficial. My mother slid her white high heels into the ground, planting them down into the soil. I watched them slide into the soil and I thought about sex. In the morning my mother said she had ruined her shoes, the leather around the heel was torn. The leather breaking itself against the soil as my mother put the heel in and out of soil.
The party neither swirled nor glistened, it stayed making minor movements like paramecium. Children flitted around looking like their parents, and their parents stood looking polite. Always so polite. And how my father kept his stories for his children, how he would have probably told me about the drunk gardener who came over and made two off colour jokes about prostate cancer and pedophilia which left everyone uncomfortably but politely laughing and wishing the gardener, whose face looked like a toby jug, would disappear. My father with his brown hair and oversized glasses with the lanyard hanging around his neck, my father's face in beads of sweat and with a mess of white hairs on his chest. My father with his books on the holocaust, and my father with his unfinished memoirs and so many unwritten forgotten stories.
