Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

“What do you do there?”

“I teach.”

“A teacher. That’s grand. What is it you teach?”

“Creative Writing.”

I watch him mulling this over, but growing a little impatient now. I get fed up of repeating myself, wanting him to retain some information about my life, for it to have some meaning for him. A smile begins to form on his lips.

“Writing?”

I nod and he laughs scornfully, “You’d think they’d be able to write properly by the time they got to University. Christ, what’s the world coming to?”

I agree that it’s gone to hell in a handcart. When we start walking again, he’s still chuckling to himself, convinced I’ve pulled a fast one—what a way to make a living.

I must try to get him out more often. At home, the house is always overheated, the television on, way too loud, all day long. Sometimes, as he looks around him, I’m sure he’s wondering how he got here, sitting next to this middle-aged man he believes is probably his son, he certainly looks familiar, struggling to make conversation with him. I am careful to call him Dad often, frequently mentioning my mother, reminding him that this woman, this child that I have brought with me are my own family. What I’m trying to do, what I want, so much, is to place him in a familiar network of associations and meanings. Native Americans speak of having a map in the head, a way of knowing where one is in relationship to the land, its history, society, and all living beings. Most days now, my father has no map, all meaning draining away from his surroundings.

Yes, I really must try to get him out more often.

Back at the Information Centre I get two teas from the machine, bring them across to one of the tables. We sip our drinks looking out at a couple of swans gliding across one of the flooded clay pits. Here at Far Ings, they have created a nature reserve reclaimed from an industry based on digging up the land. In fact this visit is partly a reconnaissance mission, I had the idea of bringing my Creative Writing students here for inspiration, getting them away from the seminar room and out into the world. Unlike the quarries that I visited recently, where you could feel the poignant absence of what is no longer there, here a kind of balance has been restored. When I explain how this place came about my father is delighted. It’s a process that chimes with his belief that the land was here before us, and would survive our tenancy, still be here long after we have gone.

“If I had my way,” he says, “I’d turn every factory, every site that I’d ever worked on into a place like this. They’ve done a good job here, a damned good job.”

We sit for quite some time without the need for conversation, at ease in each other’s company.

Before we head off, we look at the display about the various birds it’s possible to see at Far Ings, and the incredible journeys that they make to reach here. The pink-footed geese coming from Arctic Russia, the swallows and sedges from South Africa, the sand martins from Chad.

“Isn’t it amazing?” says Dad, “the journeys these birds make.”

We read the panel informing us that scientists still don’t fully understand why birds migrate.

“What about you, Dad? Why did you migrate?”

I watch him thinking about this for a while, then he says, “Half the people I went to school with left too, sure there was nothing for us at home.” He starts to laugh, “A great flock of Paddies migrating, that’s what we were—thousands of the buggers descending on Britain.”

This a glimpse of his old self re-emerging—irreverent, scornful. It used to get him into trouble sometimes, when people tried to have a serious discussion about the burning issues of the day.

We look through the window, see a man below with a pair of binoculars and a camera strung around his neck.

“Bird watching, aye, there’s plenty of fellas who love it. I never did it meself. It looks a grand hobby, though, very relaxing.”

But he did do it. Sometimes I’d catch him standing utterly still and silent back in Wales, riveted by the flocks of swallows gathering on telegraph poles in September, before wheeling away in formation and heading back to Africa. Hard not to think he was envying them their return to their homeland, while he was stuck here for another year. Unlike the swallows and sedges, the sand martins and pink-footed geese, he never made it back to where he came from.

You move for work or education, for what you think are short-term goals, but before you know it you are putting off your return home for another year, then another. There is a sense of exhilaration whenever I cross the Severn Bridge to Wales and leave England behind. For a few days I feel that I finally belong somewhere—I rediscover my map in the head. So why the surge of relief when I leave again a few days later? I wonder if Dad used to feel something similar when he was departing Ireland, shrugging off myriad obligations, feeling suddenly weightless?

My father asks, “What is it you do again?”

I explain about teaching at Hull University once more.

“Where’s that?”

“Just there, across the river.”

He looks to his right, over the murky water into Yorkshire.

“Does your mother know?”

I tell him she does.

“Has she told them in Ireland?”

“She has. I’ll take you there later, to the University. I’ll show you my office.”

“You have an office?”

The wonder in his voice reminds me how when I got my degree, many years ago now, he said, “Christ, you’re made, boy, bleddy well made. You’ll never have to work outside in the rain and the cold again.”

When we’re back outside and heading for the car park I realise that I’ve left my notebook on one of the tables. I suggest that he waits in the car while I run back and get it.

“Ah no,” he says, “I think I’ll go and sit on that bench over there next to the water.”

For a moment I’m worried about leaving him outside on his own like that. But he looks so happy at the prospect that I dismiss my fears.

“Okay, Dad, alright. If that’s what you want.”

“I think I’ll do a bit of bird watching while I’m here.”

I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.

“Are you going to take it up as a hobby?”

He hesitates, looking across the water into the reeds.

“I think I will.”

He seems serious.

“I’ll get you a pair of binoculars for your birthday then, shall I?”

“Aye, just the job.”

I’ll buy us both a pair, and we’ll come back and look for bitterns and marsh harriers. We’ll stand side by side in one of the hides, I’ll bring a flask of tea, a pack of sandwiches. We’ll make a day of it. I walk over to the bench with him, watch him settle down, stretch out his legs and turn up his face to the late afternoon sun.

“You sure you’re alright?”

“I’m grand,” he replies, “go on, take as long as you want, I’m in no hurry, sure.”

As I walk back up the stairs to the Information Centre I’m humming. If he’s feeling this good then maybe we can go for a drink. Suddenly I have this desire to see him supping a pint of Guinness, a thread of the creamy head coating his lips, him gripping the glass and savouring the aftertaste.

“That’s a grand pint.”

Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We passed a pub on the way, The Sloop Inn, that looked old-fashioned, friendly, unthreatening—we’ll go there, have an early drink and get something to eat while we’re at it.

The notebook is where I left it, lying on the table, I pick it up, pop it in my bag and amble back downstairs and into the car park.

The bench is empty. Of course it is. I look around, just to be sure, but he’s nowhere to be seen. When it’s clear that he’s gone, that our brief time together is over, I feel a hole opening up inside me. For a long time I just stand there in the middle of the car park, slowly getting used to the world without him all over again. It felt so very good to have him back, even for such a short time. We get on much better now he’s dead.