Tomorrow Is My Father´s Birthday

Tomorrow is my father’s 75^th birthday.

I picture him in his farmhouse on that hillside in France. Undoubtedly he will be celebrating it with his new friends; the neighbouring farmer and his wife across the street, the Dutch doctor and the other Dutch couple in the village below. Maybe they’ll all come over to his place, and be able to sit in the garden, if the March-sun proves warm enough. I’m sure he will be most entertaining; the guests will see a charming man, a real artist, an asset to their community. In the tool shed, the swallows will be starting to repair their nests again. Flying off in a heart’s beat, they will be sailing effortlessly through the narrow holes in the walls, cross the spacious inside of the barn, and continue their way out on the other side, over the fields behind it, searching for nesting materials and food. They’ll return and dive full-flight into their nests, as I’ve seen them do last summer.

His wife had picked me up from the train station, on that sunny morning last August. The first moments we filled with polite small-talk, and my father wasn’t able to relax with me around, until I assured him I had no hidden motives to visit him. It had been four years since he so abruptly broke off all contact with us, his 5 children. I wanted no more than to see how he was doing. That’s all, no hidden agendas, really. He then gave me the grand tour of his new house, and I followed and listened to him. The house itself is confusing, as it consists of several smaller buildings grown together on that steep hillside. There are stairs turning and leading to different levels; the place was as dizzying as the occasion. He showed me the plans they have for all the various rooms. The working places they were finishing: the dark one downstairs for his etching and woodcutting, with the heavy solid presses. The lighter room somewhere upstairs with his wife´s latest painting on an easel and painting equipment scattered all around. The guesthouse they were building in a former attic. Everything was old, but tended to.

I imagine the garden around the old house to be waking up now, after the long winter. My father will have to work the ground of the herb-garden and the flowerbeds, as the soil will be hard as rock after the passing of snow and ice. I know where the fruit trees are, with their old crooked shapes. On that sunny afternoon many months ago, the ground below them was covered with apples. There were just too many to put them to good use, in spite of the spacious cellar with shelves for preserved food, that my father’s second wife proudly showed me. So the fallen apples were left to rot, or to be eaten by the neighbour’s cows, as they trotted below the apple-trees in the morning to their fields down-hill, and back again in the late afternoon. Standing in the shade, my father picked me an apple, a beautiful one hanging high up in the tree. I remember looking at him that very moment, thinking that he looked older, a little more vulnerable. I wanted to hold on to this as a happy moment, a demonstration of the unbreakable bond, as a father handed his daughter an apple.

We went back to the house to sit outside in the garden, where his wife joined us again and poured me some lemon tea. He talked, and she added to his stories. I listened. Not once did he ask me about me, my life, his other children, his granddaughter; nothing. I was beginning to feel lost, this was strictly one-way. The sun was starting to burn my skin, the abundance of colourful flowers and smells were slowly suffocating me, and my father could not have been farther away, sitting right across the table. I looked at him and saw the situation for what it was. I was being a mere audience here. He would have picked that apple for everybody, he would have told a passing mailman those damn stories. I realised then and there that my father had moved on, had reinvented a new life and surrounded himself with new people. So what if I still needed him; he sure did not need me, so what was I doing there?

Shortly after this, I said goodbye to him and his wife and left them behind on their hill-top. I saw the relief in my father’s eyes. He was actually glad to see me go, to end the visit and write it off as being of no result. Still, convinced myself I had every reason to feel triumphant. I had come to fight a dragon, and maybe only slain its shadow, but I did go after it. And it had not killed me either.

So, it is his birthday tomorrow. I know that a man on a hill in France somewhere has no influence on my life whatsoever. To have a father to celebrate with would have been nice.