I dedicate this book to Australia,
my second home,
but also to my wife,
who enabled me
to go back there so often.

It concerns all life to know whether the soul be mortal or immortal.
—BLAISE PASCAL

“You have to take it for me,” said Nella.
What could I say to that? I licked her hand.

I woke with a terrible start from an awfully nasty dream, almost jumping out of my skin, and for a while I thought that the darkness around me was the beginning of my life after death, but the next moment I realized it had all been a dream and I trembled with the thought that I had fallen asleep and that lousy swine could easily have throttled me in my sleep, before I had time to show what I thought of him. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep, but when I opened my eyes, it was still pitch dark. For some time I lay motionless with my head pressed to the floor, so he couldn’t put a steel wire round my neck if he were already standing on top of me, and I waited to see if I could hear him. Only then did I carefully raise my head and gaze out through the mesh doors into the night in case I caught sight of the swine somewhere. I smelt something in the air, but it might just have been the stench of that foul dream. I could only distinguish the dark outlines of Nella’s azaleas and camelias and the two mauve flowers of a marshmallow, which had forgotten to fade on the bush during their journey here. For some time I listened intently in case I heard some rustle that gave him away. It was unnaturally quiet in the bush as if just at this moment something awful were about to happen. Even Joe’s quiet snoring sounded like a death rattle. My fur stood uncontrollably on end and I raised my head to the sky. Not a leaf stirred in the crowns of the eucalyptus trees. What would that swine be doing up in the eucalyptuses, girl? I said to myself. The swine doesn’t fly in the clouds. He keeps to the ground, hiding behind the trunks of old trees, covering himself in the dark undergrowth, taking advantage of the dark and the still air and taking very good care not to crack a single dry twig beneath his creeping footsteps. He behaves like every maniac about to satisfy his lust. Without moving, he’s able to silently wait long hours for his chosen victim and the right moment for him. Without seeing him, I sensed with all my sick old body that somewhere out there in the dark in the middle of the night he was standing, holding his breath, with his famous wire-loop-and-stick snare, just waiting for me, all numb with terror, to stick my head into that trap myself, he will just give it a sharp jerk and I will dance wildly for a short time in that steel loop of his, my desperate grrrrr will be lost in Joe’s snoring and I lose ten nothing against that swine for good and for keeps. And at that moment I saw him. Immediately my heart started beating wildly. You made a mistake, you creep, I exulted, if it is possible to exult with lungs drawn tight by terror. I saw the tips of his polished boots shining even in the darkness of the night. He stood behind the nearest azalea, not two metres from me, directly beneath the veranda steps, without moving. He probably did not guess that I could see his boots. That was my advantage. I did not release my eyes from those shiny boot tips, concentrating on them as if they were the head of a venomous tiger snake. That’s what I was taught by Bertie: to carefully follow a snake’s head so that I have enough time to dodge it as it bends back and immediately springs forward, missing me as I grip it tight behind its head and bite through its neck. That is a hold for a stalemate situation when there is a conflict of interests in the bush that cannot be put off till the next day. And it was just such a situation that I was in in the middle of the night: a struggle for bare life can’t be put off till the next day either and that swine stood there statue-still. He stood there without moving for minutes on end stretching into whole hours, and I urgently needed to go, but that had to wait. If I’d got up, I would have had to stretch out my neck, and before I’d got onto these lame feet of mine, I would have been dead. And Nella would have been grateful for that! Oh yes. But she wouldn’t say anything but ‘promises, promises’, and then straight away she would rack her brains over how to get by without me. And I would be disgraced. I looked out at the tips of his boots and they were still there. My eyes burned and ached from this endless gawping, but I did not dare even for a moment to tear them away from these two shining points. I knew that if I relaxed just for a second, he would jump and I would not have time to get away. I’d made up my mind that I had to maintain my small advantage and I hypnotized those two shining points at the foot of the dark bush until cockcrow. All that time he did not budge half an inch. Just now and then a faded azalea flower fell to earth, scaring me to the brink of dizziness. Only in the pre-morning half-light, as the stars were fading on the horizon did I recognize, fool that I am, the shiny tips of those knacker’s boots to be part of the shabby old pedestal of a plaster statuette – just one of the many plaster ‘adonises’ and naughty nymphs that Nella bought for twenty cents at the second hand-store in Saint Albans and stuck that worthless kitsch in, as Handsome Serge said, among the clumps of flowers around the cabin, making herself a sensuously sophisticated Europe out of this plain old wilderness. It was just a stupid boy made of plaster that had been standing there for as long as I could remember: turn a tap and he starts to pee a very thin streak into a clump of flowers to entertain arriving guests. In a word, amusing proof that my sight has long since abandoned me, an old injury to my left eye having taken its toll. Fortunately, nothing came of it. The murderous maniac had most probably also grown tired and fallen asleep somewhere, but that might just be part of his game that I had not yet seen through and I now wanted to have a piss more than ever. I wondered whether to go out or to torment myself a while longer and wait until day had fully dawned. Next to me Joe was sleeping in his wheely chair, not guessing for a moment the terror that I had been through for hours on end. This year we have been sleeping together on the veranda, while the youngsters are tucked up at the back in the bedroom. Joe sits in his chair, his head lolling back helplessly, snoring. It doesn’t bother him any more that Pete had again forgotten to roll him into bed from his wheely chair yesterday evening. He has got used to that. When Nella died, he fondly believed that Pete would look after him. After all he had supported him. But the youngster very quickly put him right there. Yesterday they came home late at night again. I heard them from as far off as Gunderman. What they call music is always thumping and screaming from the open car windows, stones leap from the wheels as tipsy Pete wildly slams his elephant’s foot on the accelerator and they all end up over beyond the Chinese jasmine, up past the barbeque, at the big aloes, as they bang the car doors and Pete bawls things out into the night, having long driven all the rock wallabies that swarmed around the rocks up there off somewhere into the hills towards Saint Albans, which even Pete’s loutish racket fortunately cannot reach. The girl as usual did not go into the cabin but ran straight into the shower. Even before she got to the front veranda she had torn off her clothes, under which she now wears nothing during the summer and ran into the outdoor bathroom. The young man disappeared into the kitchen to open some sardines, which weren’t sardines, but smoked mussels in oil, though he didn’t mind. He didn’t even use a fork. He poked them out with his forefinger and greedily thrust them into his mouth. He hadn’t put half of them away when his “propeller”, as he giddily called her whenever he spoke about her, came running round him naked. Bruno said that the girl had a little backside like a shallot, complete with the whiskers at the bottom. But her rotund little alabaster bottom reminds me more of a freshly peeled lychee. There was once a time when I had a pert bottom like that too. When the young man saw that bottie flashing past he roared and turned red like the oil from the smoked mussels that gleamed on his chin, threw the can of mussels into the bin, dropped his threadbare checked shorts to his crotch as he ran and with bare backside disappeared after his “propeller” into the back bedroom, where Nella and Joe had slept for years. At first, the two of them used to at least close the doors but ever since it happened to Joe they behaved as if he weren’t there. The little praying mantis liked to show herself half naked and Pete went mad whenever she got it on for him. It would certainly not have bothered them if Joe had gone after them into the bedroom in his wheely chair. Yesterday they did it in front of him sitting at breakfast. In return Joe acted as if he hadn’t noticed, putting on a neutral expression and a glazed look, and it most probably was all the same to him. In the bedroom their mating always takes place the same way: noisy squabbling can be heard first and then after a period of silence the whole cabin resounds to regular hollow blows as the girl bangs her head on the wall – the walls are also hollow and the cabin stands on stumps a couple of feet above the ground so that the white ants don’t eat it – then the noisy groaning starts up, then finally the shrieking, while he grunts like a pig with a knife to its throat and only then does Pete’s regular snoring reverberate round the cabin. Yesterday it was my turn. I went to finish off the mussels from the bin. But Joe was left empty-handed. They had again forgotten him on the veranda in his wheely chair. Not for the first time. As I say, Joe no longer even tries to protest. How could he, girl? He just quietly waits there all evening until it gets dark to see if he is going to sleep in his own bed, so that he doesn’t by chance fall asleep and give those two any bother with his limp body if they happen to want to tip it onto the bed. Joe is quiet and patient, just as he was quiet and patient all his life. Every evening he gazes for a long time into the dying day. Who knows what he is thinking of, if anything? Nobody sees into him any more, so I lick his hand, he closes his eyes and falls asleep like a puppy. That’s how it always is when they forget him. And that’s Joe all over. A quiet, considerate companion. Nella hesitated for a long time but then she unexpectedly turned over a new leaf in life, married him and did very well. Only one time do I remember the good old soul acting rotten, but I have forgiven him for that long ago. Don’t give me that, girl! I think I forgave but I didn’t forget. Just lately, as I watch the days dying, I have again begun to pick over his old crime. At the time I was sure I would never forgive him for it, but eventually Nella and I said to ourselves – einmal ist keinmal. Be a bit generous, old girl, life is too long and the soul is too complicated, and because it was in great anger, and what’s more, he must have had an awful migraine, it might even have ached more than it does for you. And then again, girl, you have a hand in it too, you got him into that state, you caused it all. I know. I’m not arguing either. As I say, I have long forgiven him, but recently I have been bringing it to mind from time to time, particularly when I mull over what my life was actually about and what it could have been about if what could have been, but wasn’t, had actually been.

Now just a step away from death I often wonder what on earth there is to life that makes us fear for it so. Those two in the back bedroom? Or this poor fellow here in the wheely chair? Or me, staring into the dark all night and pricking up my ears so that bugger doesn’t surprise me, when he is just a piece of a plaster pedestal? Nella never bothered herself with such questions, not even, I’d say, in Prince Henry Hospital, when she already knew she didn’t have long left. She lived voraciously and with pleasure, just as she ate voraciously and with pleasure, panting, slurping and grunting with pleasure as she lived, not looking to right or to left, let alone at herself. She believed that we have everything written out in advance somewhere and that we’ll change nothing of it, so there’s no point worrying over futile questions about why something happened or didn’t happen, if after all so much is yet to happen! When things flared up with Nella and they took her off to hospital, everyone rushed to sincerely wish her good health, but she just smiled, waited until the last ones had closed the door behind them and quietly died, although she had lived with such passion. She accepted it as her fate. She never reckoned up with anybody in her life. It never even occurred to her. There are simply beings who are unaware of that forever-careworn debit and credit book of Joe’s. And yet at the very end, without the two sides in her book being logically calculable or morally weighable, she got caught up within us, a being to whom we will remain once and for all indebted. And by that I do not mean all those cans of dogfood! She is surely doing fine in the memories of entire strangers too, in those tales of hers which we sense but we do not know, which definitely captivate their listeners, perhaps even infecting them with her fatalism, releasing them from despair over the past and eternal fears over the future, which in Nella’s view is set in advance for everyone anyway, no matter what contortions they may perform, because they cannot get out of their own skin. When somebody was arguing with Nella about her faith she’d say try it, do something that’d never occur to you and something you would really like to do a couple of times and you’ll see how things stand between you and fate. And yet Nella – and Joe would bear me out here if he could speak – remained a believer even after her death, without ever thinking such accounts were of any importance at all. The dead know sod all, she would say and that would be that. Yes, girl, I have always wanted to be just like that.

I can’t stand it any more. There’s nothing for it – I’m going to have to go. Get up, girl, and make sure you don’t pee on the carpet. It’s infuriating that only a mesh mosquito door separates me from the bush and from those ridiculous plaster tips, but who is going to open that door? I have to go around, through the living room, where Pete knocked a chair over as he ran sweating, which I will have to avoid in the gloom, through the kitchen with its irksome plastic tape flytraps on the door, out onto the outer veranda to the barbeque, where every weekend that I remember, Joe was in command in his kitchen apron and with his T-bone steaks and lamb chops, while at the table next to him beneath the huge pine tree Nella with a glass of white wine and a verve all her own urged on the merry youngsters. The bigger the get-together, the merrier things were and Nella glowed. Sometimes as many as forty people, who didn’t previously know each other or who hadn’t seen each other for years, got together at our place out here in the bush. But the nights always ended with hugs all round and Nella’s favourite Moravian songs, full of nostalgia and allegorical vulgarities, until the beer, wine, spirits and everything that people had been pouring down their throats began to make their their eyes cloud over wistfully. Now out there in the pre-morning gloom there is a burnt-out camp fire covered over by a rusty sheet of metal and right behind the loo, overgrown by an enormous philodendron with huge leaves, from which the pallid green penises of the supposedly edible fruit tastelessly stick out, that perverted swine, who’s here for the first time and immediately thinks he’s the boss, is certainly lying in wait for me. He’s most probably holding his greasy stick with its steel snare in his hand and quietly sticking his lizard’s tongue out between his bloodless lips, as if he can’t wait to savour his ugly deed. I’d rather wet myself here than go out there, just to make that bungler bite off his tongue in anger! Really, girl, I’d rather do it here on the veranda, but the stain would not dry out by the morning and Pete, put out of sorts by a hangover as he is every morning, would give me a good thrashing. And Joe would catch it as well, even though he’s sleeping and it’s obviously all he can do not to wet himself again too and get himself told off in foul language. Although I think he’s already done it anyway. I’ll try to sleep it off before day fully breaks. My chin is quite simply trembling with fear. How can I help it that I’m old but that I’m not allowed to die yet? I promised Nella. I always wanted to be like her, but I only ever really tried once and I humbly came back with drooping ears and my tail between my legs. I still reproach myself for it to this day. Perhaps that is why I think about it for days on end, I live it over again bit by bit, seeking out in my memory whatever is still worth remembering. Apart from my great escape, the escapade of a little madam from the town, there were another couple of venial sins, but they weren’t up to very much. After all, in contrast to Nella, I only had two lovers in my life, and one of those was just platonic. The first one, the platonic one, was the local mongrel and a bit of a tramp. He had a large black patch round his left eye and a black saddle on his back, but otherwise he had short, white, bristly hair like a pig’s, but then again not exactly the same. Over his entire body that white, bristly coat hid little black patches. Even beneath his tail there was one right next to his arse hole. But he wasn’t a dalmatian. He was more of a short-haired fox terrier mixed with something considerably taller, so that he didn’t drag his chest along the ground at all like the neighbour’s blue Peggy, who also laid a claim to him. He was just this muscular, wiry boy and he was called Spotty. Handsome Serge called him walking op-art. Where’s our modern art these days then? he yelled when Spotty hadn’t shown up for a long time. Before the two of us had chummed up and before Spotty had settled in with us, he occasionally brightened every household from Gunderman to the fishermen’s hostel at the far side of Spencer. He knew that part of the Hawkesbury River left bank in such detail that not even old Percy Daniels, who once went after him, ever caught him out. Nobody at all was up to Spotty. Tony said he surely had some bull terrier in him, but then again he didn’t look like some pug-nosed pig. All the same, it was because of his slightly shorter legs that we never got it together. The first time I saw him I even found him funny and I turned my nose up at him, and now that it is all the same I pine for him. There was so much life in him that if he appeared here now I swear that I would forget my deafness, blindness, cancer-ridden lungs and these painful old pins of mine and I would take off with him wherever he wanted, perhaps right out into the bush again. This time I would not stray off from him. I see him as if he were here today with his arched rear legs like those of a real guy, so his balls fit in nicely between those muscular thighs of his, his manly bulging chest with no paunch at all, because he would run miles and miles on empty and sometimes very fast when some idiot took a shot at him from behind as he flew by. No, keep sleeping quietly, Joe, that wasn’t meant for you. When we were out with Spotty you were always generous towards him, and sometimes you even gave him a whole lamb chop from the day before. He did okay with us. Eventually, I was the one who spoilt everything. I was young and beautiful, but really swollen-headed too, with my snout pretty high in the air, just behaving like a young lady from the town among the bumpkins. And as always happens to such stuck-up young ladies, something bad goes on around them and this time it was poor Spotty who caught it. Ever since he has lain somewhere in that awful salt swamp out there beyond the road in the mangroves. I only roughly know where. The river might have taken him with the ebbing tide out into the Pacific Ocean, but he is most probably still lying in that stinking swamp opposite, totally satisfied. It never took much to make Spotty happy. He found the best in what is bad. The only fine thing that he really yearned for in life, more valuable to him than a discarded ham sandwich in a waste bin, was me. I was his true love, whom he initiated into the secrets of a true dog’s life. He even went out into the bush with me whenever I wanted, although he didn’t like the bush. For him I was simply the young lady from the town, whom he kept licking whenever he dared come near, and when I sometimes angrily let fly at him he just went and lay down opposite and looked at me for maybe the entire afternoon. He had a velvet gaze and his left eye in that black patch was always smiling foxily, while the other eye placidly dozed away. For a long time I acted as if I didn’t notice him, and that I thought he was just a village fart. To this day I don’t regret escaping from him, but I do regret what I caused him as a result. We could still have enjoyed ourselves for many years and my life would have most probably looked completely different. Forgive me, Spotty, if you can. I still feel all that regret even now. Whoever invented regret was a real brute. He sure spiced up all those missed opportunities of ours…I hear something. Even Joe has stopped snoring next to me. Somebody’s coming…barefoot, stamping like an elephant. Easy, girl, it’s not the one that the cicadas were whistling to you about early yesterday evening. It’s a completely different maniac. The veranda doors suddenly fly open and it’s our six-and-a-half-foot-tall Pete, known to his mates as Mouthy. As always he gets out of bed completely naked, without wasting his time getting dressed, his body as white as a white ant’s, with a temper to match. What’s the rush? What could be making him go? As if we didn’t know: a bladder full of beer. I’m only surprised he didn’t pee straight out of the bedroom window like he did last time.

That’s him, Black Pete, as Nella started calling him, when she and Joe first had to collect him from the Bronte Road police station and pay his bail. Now he has thoughtlessly shoved Joe’s wheely chair aside, banging it against the veranda wall, stepping over me as if I were a cowpat, pulled back the mesh doors slightly and sent a powerful stream gushing through the crack across the stone veranda steps right onto the head of that plaster statuette that kept me up all night with fear and which didn’t actually pee itself. Now Joe would never do anything like that himself. I can’t imagine Joe climbing over his ‘propeller’ and peeing in front of her out of the window without even noticing that there’s a mosquito net in the window, like our drunken pig did last time. I was only sorry that the falling window didn’t fall on his hose. That would have put an end to the fun.

Hardly had he given it a shake and staggered back to the bedroom when those two started rutting. Even a deaf person would have been able to tell. Propeller did growl sleepily for a while, but shortly afterwards she was banging her head on the wallpaper again, though she was probably asleep all the time. Joe and I were already used to their pre-morning tattoo. Joe went back to sleep immediately, if he had at all been awake, and I thought I ought to doze for a while too, and let that vampire come for me – at least I won’t know about it. I just can’t stand it any more. What am I to do, girl, when my body is afraid to get up? All I can do is sleep it off.

The sweetest times for me are always those when I don’t know for sure if I am still awake or already asleep – that moment on the verge of sleep when I can already see its reassuring beginning. I went back for a while to the past, many years back, an entire eternity, and again I was living the days of my youth which I had long forgotten. It began marvellously. Like once upon a time. I recognized it. I was on Bronte. Lying on the rear veranda behind the house where the honking of the car horn reached my ears. You couldn’t miss it, never mind confuse it with anything else. Bruno had been given that little toy by his Italian boss and had it put into his old red Toyota. The memory of that fanfare trill tore through the grey mist of old age and in the twinkling of an eye I was again that sparklingly lovely young virgin, barely able to hold down that feeling of happiness with myself. Elegantly, I raised myself and trotted off into the garage – not too fast, so that I didn’t have to wait, but then not all that slowly, because my gladness was the same breed as that of Pavlov’s salivating dogs. It was Thursday afternoon and I loved those Thursdays on Bronte, because that’s when the boys came over to play darts in the garage with Joe and Nella. On Thursday Joe always left his Ford on the driveway outside the gate, rolled up the shutter and opened the garage door on the other side behind the house, where the cooling, damp shade lay in the afternoon, to expel the mustiness from the garage. That morning at five o’ clock, just like on every sunny day, Nella had watered the entire garden around the house and its rampant foliage had rewarded her with its overpowering green smell. I never liked that putrid odour of damp, steamy garden jungle and only much later was I to learn what the scent of water meant in the bush full of white-baked rocks. But in that living dream I was again that stupid girl who wasn’t bothered a bit about red-hot sandstone rocks somewhere out in the bush. I just gave my bottom a wiggle and ran out onto the roadway to watch Bruno with that beer belly of his winding himself out of the car and complimenting me loudly all down the street. On the way from the harbour he normally stopped off at a pub and bought in another couple of beers for the others. He brought us all kinds of Italian buns from work for the birds in the garden. I never even touched them, but I was always glad to see him, because he came first. I could still hear Joe calling me back to go and get fed, but suddenly – and this is on the borderline between dreaming and memory – the garage shutter was drawn and everybody was already there. Bruno was a member of the Hardy Club down on Bronte Beach, who by gawping all year round at young girls sunbathing and running bare-breasted into the ocean waves got cancer of the lymph glands and was forbidden to walk in the sun by the doctor, so when he’s not chatting away somewhere in the pub, he lies beside the radio and reads all the newspapers that come out in the town, so that he always has something to talk and keep talking about. He said he always wanted to be a journalist or a radio reporter (he had a rich, melodious voice). Absolutely everybody was there in this living dream, Swell George with his unruly raven-black hair, slicked-back, Elvis-style, who once thought a lot of Nella (and who knows if he just thought of her) and Handsome Serge and my Tony, kneading my ear and making the odd comment to Joe, who again blamed his aching shoulder and again threw his light darts feathers-first so they landed where they shouldn’t have in a masterly way. And of course, the two of us were there too – me and Nella – our divas, as Handsome Serge called us. (Hey, nowadays it sounds stupid, but in those days I thought it was a nice compliment.) They were all there – nobody was missing. That’s grand, girl, I kept saying to myself, really happy. I was sitting among them, looking from one to the other, depending on who was talking, eating or drinking. And I was young again and hungry for everything. The boys were drinking beer from cans, Nella poured herself some hock from a cardboard cask, as always everybody had come in a good mood, mostly because by some miracle they had found each other again in this huge labyrinth of a city. I was overwhelmed at that moment by a rapturous dreamy sensation that everything was coming back. Of course, in those days we also used to go down to the bowling alley, or the horse races at Randwick, or for a better-class evening, somewhere in town with other mates, when somebody had a baby or got married or celebrated a big anniversary (we didn’t have deaths yet in those days). Girl, maybe it was because of my sheepdog blood, that I liked them most of all nice and togetherly in the little garage where we were all closest. I don’t know myself why they didn’t sit out on the terrace on top of the garage, with the great view of the ocean in the afternoon and the city at night. Maybe so they could get frolicsome without disturbing the strict peace and quiet of the sleepy suburb. That is the lot of the foreigner. As for Nella’s cask of hock, it must have been before that stormy November night in Hawkesbury, when great lightning flashes rent the sky and Nella started puking blood at half two in the morning and only stopped at daybreak in Gosford Hospital. All the terrycloth towels that they took with them were soaked in her blood and Joe came back bloodsoaked. The doctors couldn’t figure out why she was bleeding – they simply couldn’t find anything apart from high blood pressure, so Nella got over it with a wave of the hand. But from then on she didn’t drink more than two (or three) glasses of wine an evening, insisting that the doctor had actually ordered her to (he told her one at most, unless he wanted to kill her). But at that regular Thursday garage get-together in my dream Nella actually won the game, throwing darts as if she were cutting material for clothes by sight. I did always want to get inside her skin as a permanent victor. Everybody embraced and kissed the winner and she offered round the treats she had prepared and Bruno opened the fridge to pass out more dewy beer to the others. We were young again and enjoyed ourselves being together. Tony, who went out of his way for me, would unexpectedly give me a ham sandwich, so I cleverly lay at his feet in impatient expectation of that unexpected moment. It was a game that was part of all the games in the garage, and all those games somehow revolved around Nella, and yet even in that dream I was surprised she was there again amongst us. When anybody got bored of sticking darts into pig’s bristles or didn’t manage to, then they would start singing one of those long drawn-out songs of Nella’s, sorrowful as a dog’s yowling. To tell the truth, before I went almost completely deaf, I didn’t like that bleating of theirs, because it made my ears ache, before I understood that it was not the darts but the singing that brought them together. Bruno usually sang the first voice – he could bleat as if his balls were being crushed, then Nella sang second voice and everybody else immediately joined in. Joe was the only one who didn’t sing. Joe was from the Iron Mountains and was orphaned as a small boy, so he didn’t have anybody to teach him those songs. Joe was like me. Joe was an observer of life – he pensively observed life, as if he wanted to understand it, unless he was actually preoccupied that way repairing one of the lawn mowers. When Nella, Bruno and Tony started up, everybody immediately grasped Nella around the shoulder on one side, pressed their heads together, raised their free arms up to the Lord, Moravian-fashion, while George stood in front of them with feet apart and a strand of his raven-black hair falling macho-style over his forehead, embracing all three and with all his strength yelling the words of the song right into Nella’s face. They always looked like a little rugby scrum waiting in vain for the ball. Handsome Serge would meanwhile wipe the results off the board and with the gestures of a maestro and sure-handed strokes of chalk he drew on the board that singing group of outcasts (to which I also supposedly belonged through my grandmother or great-grandmother), who somewhere at a Thursday garage get-together, lost at the other end of the earth, found the common chord which they had sought in vain elsewhere in the world. Heather from next door would always ask on Friday what we had been celebrating this time, and Handsome Serge would again say our misspent lives. A fellow who at one time wanted us to be a successful ethnic minority in Herald was told by him that we had died of our illusions, that we would soon return home, and so there was no need to start another career. We just needed to wait awhile, have a sing-song, bathe in the ocean and soon the red putsch would be behind us, whereas the Hungarians, who had been hanging each other from the lampposts in the 1956 revolt against the communists, knew straight away that they would never be able to go back home, that it was for life, so they immediately took out loans from the bank and started building skyscrapers here to get a name for themselves in the world. Handsome Serge is a brainbox!

Translated by Melvyn Clarke