my grandmother, ortrud silbernagl
pig
fragmentary
Photograph: 25.09. 2023
2005 I broke off contact with my father. After years of constant arguing, I didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. In 2019, I reconnected with him. I figured he wouldn't live forever, and I didn't want to let him go just like that, without having seen him again.
For the past few years, I visited him every two weeks. We never talked about what had happened. I didn't want to rekindle the old arguments, and I had no hope that we would come to any agreement by talking about what had happened. This way our relationship remained on the surface.
My attempts to find out about the past stayed fruitless, my father couldn´t answer most of my questions.
Then, at simple point I realized I knew very little about him and his life.
I should have asked earlier. Now it was too late.
Fragmental memories:
As a child, I admired my him. Maybe all children do. Anyway, in his stories my father somehow conveyed to me the feeling how great he was.
I wish I wouldn´t have admired him that much. I wish I would have seen more as a real person than my father-hero. Maybe I would have managed our relationship better over the years. With more caution and empathy.
In the evenings before we went to sleep, our parents often sang Hungarian children's and folk songs to us. This is one of my dearest memories.
I can still remember some of the Christmas presents. Many of the toys we received as gifts were made by my parents themselves.
The stuffed elephant to ride, the building blocks, which he had sawed to size and colored himself.
My first camera. Ice-cream in the afternoons. Money for books. Visiting art exhibitions.
Later, my father took me to jazz concerts and classical concerts.
On the other hand:
I can vaguely remember being beaten as a child. My father liked to tell a story over and over again: how he once slapped me, and I fell over on my side, and then he slapped me from the other side as well, so I wouldn't fall over. He thought it was a good story, and kind of funny, too.
The beatings stopped as I grew older. I remember well how surprised I was when I realized that they had only beaten me while I was a little kid.
Stand in the corner! Shame on you! Slap your hand! You eat what is put on the table! Don't get hysterical!
I can still reproduce the exact pitch of these instructions. Short and cutting.
My mother was, it was said, "manic-depressive". When she was in the psychiatric ward again, we had to visit her. I watched television there out of boredom. Once a doctor there shook my hand and didn't let go for an eternity. I was bewildered.
At home mother was drugged up on medication, and often on alcohol. There were nights she just didn´t stop crying.
Her death was a relief for me.
She hadn’t come out of her room for quite a while now. I tried not to notice. Finally my dad opened the door to her room.There she was on her bed. Dead. First, we cleaned out the worst of the garbage in her room. Then my father called a doctor.
My father never spoke of her again. Not in the year after her death, nor at any time later.
After her death, he found a new love. He seemed to be very grateful to her, to this woman who made a normal life possible for him after the difficult years with my mother. A new life, a second life.
My stepmother brought two small children into the marriage, whom he happily devoted himself to.
My sister and I had now grown up, and the arguments with my father and our stepmother began. This went on for years.
My sister kept in touch with him and tried to win his interest, his approval and his love. I don't have the impression that she was successful.
Now it's about inheritance, and in his will, he left us, his biological children, only the bare essentials.
I imagine that my sister and I were part of his old, unhappy life, and he had left it all behind. Maybe it was simply our arguments. And, of course my stepmother was also a factor. But that is an other story.
It´s the way it is.