Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott Page B

know, you must know. The one where my parents get together again.
    Gwen, his ex-wife, like my own mother, she is implacable, she is unforgiving. I know her.
    I wish to know my father.
    All I know is that sons in the end confront and destroy their fathers, and hasn’t he given me ammunition! I know I’ll use it.
    Still, that would be better than sons destroying their mothers and I think I have done that.
    But then I think: without our life together, without me kicking out and kicking back and simply declaring that I am alive, I am me, I have to have my space too – without all those things, would my mother really have been able to add the quality of pain and purity and joy into her voice and that is what really gives her voice the magic depth in these new incantatory pieces that she has made her own. Even the composers of these pieces are almost servants to her voice. She has made them.
    You see how it is? To have been made by her?
    Kester, my father, is like me. He is on the edges of that. For the first time, with him, to be on the edge is to be ­somewhere. Fancy coming so far, so far back, to here, to her birthplace, to be somewhere.
    I still cannot tell if Kester will be surprised. Or glad. Or desperate. What a bucket of guilt I’m about to unload all over him. What a little Game of Consequences. On the other hand, I sort of like him. I have all the cards.

Ljubljana
    In the days when Slovenia had taken the first steps to independence from Yugoslavia by creating its own ‘national airline’ – I am thinking of the late summer of 1989 – in those times, if you walked through the markets or inner streets of Ljubljana with its old Austrian colours and sturdy wooden decorations, there was already a fine notation of difference. ‘That man selling leather jackets, he is a Serb’, my host remarked to me. ‘And that other one is an Albanian, the one at the flowerstall’. To me, they all looked Balkan and my sight, like my listening ear, was still far too superficial, stuffed with novelty and a willingness to focus on the exotic. It was a place that was consciously the most westernised of the Yugoslav regions, Roman Catholic and scorning the cyrillic alphabet. The famous Austrian composer Hugo Wolf was a Slovene.
    But back then there was another frisson for those such as me, visitors, people in transit who had no commitment to anything other than curiosity or some inner catalogue of contrasts – a sort of home movie mentality without the cameras or the equipment. There was the still dangerous thought that ‘this is an iron curtain country’. Your passport was evidence: what if you wanted to return to Australia via America? By America, of course I mean the United States, that segment of the American continent. Do not smile, I am lifting you back to a time that was. To the time before. To the Olden Days.

    And in a very real sense, travelling to Ljubljana was like travelling into places where the darker fairy tales might well have been located. The clothes people wore: imagine seeing them in Melbourne? Oh yes, some of them would be wondrous in Sydney, at the right party. The Indian decade and the Greek decade had been and gone but there was still room for Central European chic, in fact it was only just beginning. I bought myself, from the Serb vendor, a leather jacket which I wore for several years in Sydney. It was styled with an aim for international consumers who might have broad shoulders and universal poppers. It could have hung in a stall in North Sydney.
    When I was in Belgrade, the week before, I was told that city had been razed by invaders twenty-seven times. That was survival. It was also mutilation and revenge and a tenacious collective memory, armed to the teeth forever, unforgiving.
    Ljubljana, for all its solidity and the provincial heaviness of its buildings, looked both venerable (to Australian eyes) and like some of those nineteenth century Australian