Poland, June 27th

My father and I had a curious relationship. Until yesterday, and I am 52, I had thought it contained no love at all. When I was very young I was aware there had been something like love, but as I grew older it evaporated: a steam of sentimentality boiled off as the lie of he and me, father-and-son, broke to reveal a couple of inconveniently related men most happy when they were apart.

He had a fondness for puppets, robots and that kind of thing, soulless mechanical toys that paced on through life as relentlessly as he did; and there was a horrible unfathomable energy to them, as if each had a strange heart to it. I found him and them terrifying. As with them his terrorising was a non-stop. He spoke poor English, which didn’t help, regularly lapsing into Polish as he shouted and screamed at me. Little would get in the way of what he said. Not me, for sure, not a searching for the right word, not the presence of most other adults, not a special event (Christmas, birthdays): any moment of any day was game.
He was a frightening noise-producing thing: like a beehive or an alarm ringing on the wall, or a siren going off. And like his there didn’t seem to be any background to him beyond the same kind of background you’d give a hive (bees) or an alarm (in those days, Made in Hong Kong). There was no clue about what he was thinking and why.

It didn’t feel as if he was born anywhere. It was more as if he had been made, made in Poland, and what on earth was that? His father, some kind of wealthy Polish businessman born in the 1850s, looked an even more irascible and bloody-minded version of him. All I knew of his mother I drew from a photograph of my father kissing her – kissing her desperately, when he was a middle-aged man and she was very old, and kissing her unlike she was his mother.
Ideas? Thoughts, beliefs, anything to show that I was around a thinker rather than a frightening machine? He acted as automatically as his toys. Where was the thought? Emotions seemed to come to him as they would to an animal, and he’d usually have already lashed out or moved on, literally or in the way his mind closed down to one thing and transferred to another as if someone had changed channel, before I knew what had been coming.

There was nothing and nobody I could appeal to, even in my dreams, who I could imagine getting through to him. I didn’t discover he’d been to prison until I was almost an adult, but if I’d known that I could have added Her Majesty. At one point, thinking of my dreams, there was actually God. Possibly this relates to my astonishment that anyone can believe in God, because in my dream my father was Belshazzar seeing the writing on the wall. He didn’t panic and call for his wise men, though, or for a Daniel, he simply swore and ate a chicken.

I had no way of understanding my father and for a very long time I felt as if there was nothing intelligible to understand. There were reasons I came to know of at a steady rate, as I grew older, that might have explained how he was, but these only suggested to me that nothing would change. He was a madman and people who tried to stay close to him, to work him out, like my mother, seemed to be driven half-mad as well. Get drawn into thinking you understand someone like my father, or feel safe around him, and you leave your sanity behind you.

As I mentioned I am now 52, a successful person practicing psychotherapy with people unlike my father (maybe one of the reasons I have been able to become successful is that he gave me a very good rule of thumb; an interesting form of counter-transference. If someone’s at all like my father, probably don’t go there), and for the first time I am visiting Krakow, the city where my father grew up. He left in 1939, aged twenty, eventually reaching England as a member of the Polish armoured division following the evacuation at Dunkirk.

He never went back. I knew there were differences with his family, a horrible chaos of betrayal and abuse I have tried to understand but have never been able to absorb. It’s as if I have been able to see inside a room but from far away, through a narrow window, too far away to hear what is being said, only to see brief scenes that would break anybody’s heart or leave them furious, or disgusted, or terrified as I was as a child.

So my father left as the Germans and the Soviets invaded. There was a story, a scene I caught hold of, about his mother suddenly packing him a lunch of herring sandwiches and telling him to go, to get out of the way, which had stupid echoes of how I felt my own mother had behaved to me in relation to my father, the oedipal invader. Get away, find your own life. This will end terribly.

After my father left his family fragmented. Some married Germans and some remained patriots like my grandfather. He had published a newspaper at the end of the 19th century when Poland was not, in its own right a country, and he was regularly persecuted.

In 1943 my father’s sister was arrested in Krakow as part of a group of Catholic women who worked against the Germans and was sent to Auschwitz, where she died. I was told, and I can’t even remember by whom, that she had been arrested because of something her sister had said.

That aunt, a collaborator, escaped to live in New York at the end of the war, leaving what was left of my father’s family to ask him, by then settled in Scotland, if he could look after her teenage daughter.

He agreed.

What happened to her, his niece, was similar but far worse to what happened to me. On that occasion my father was sent to prison for nearly ten years for his violence towards her, including sexual assault.

He always maintained that this was a miscarriage of justice. What happened to others in his family may have been, but even though the High Court eventually, in 2000, ruled in his favour, I noticed that the judges allowed his sentencing for assault to stand. His trial judge had behaved inappropriately.
None of these scenes ever added up to a story. Every time I tried to create one it evaporated like the sense of father-and-son I mentioned at the start. There was no sense of a single mind capable of holding onto everything without it potentially being driven mad. Maybe someone like one of the film makers I came to adore, people like Jacques Rivette, David Lynch, Claire Denis or Tsai Ming Liang, could have done something with it (the artists I love often feel like the parents I never properly had), but it’s the kind of story people shouldn’t have to live with. It’s why people dispose of the truth, because the truth is unbearable.

Anyway, yesterday as my plane landed in Krakow I started to cry. It was as unexpected, even though I had wondered what it would do to me, finally going to Poland, as any of my father’s mood changes.

I thought: I’ve come back.

My mind seemed to freeze a moment before delivering another thought, as if it had almost become stuck on something but had somehow recovered.

But it was Dad that left, and I’ve come back.

I felt something start to happen, a kind of rearrangement, like clouds forming a pattern after a storm, and holding it, holding it, holding it. Sometimes I’ve seen clouds holding onto shapes for so long after the storms in which they’ve swirled and rolled from one moment to the next have ended.
The airport was busy but leaving the main terminal, as I got closer to the train into the centre of town, the crowds thinned out. I went into a washroom and found that the doors opened in a different direction from what I was used to. You had to pull from the outside, not push, and as I did so the brightness of the empty room inside flooded me: a gallery, an operating theatre, a space in Twin Peaks. There was a hum of air or electricity. I couldn’t work out which.
I stood in front of a sink and looked into a mirror, and there I was, after all that time, a man in his fifties, a white wall behind him, bald, lined, a little overweight, foreign and with an uncanny sense of not knowing how he was foreign. I don’t look much like my father, but I could see my father in me.
I thought about him, about how he could be the best or the worst thing that ever happened to you. Even when he was happening to you, it sometimes depended on where you stood, how you took that in. I am the eldest of five, with four half-siblings. My younger siblings still generally treat my father like a hero; the elder ones, they are usually hard pressed to think of anything good – and the bad things they, like me, remember are absolutely awful. I’ve noticed too how the people in my family who seem to acknowledge the worst of my father and also, it seems, to have some compassion, are the ones whose thoughts, whose memories are most reliable. The ones who seem to have also suffered but still cleave to his extraordinary specialness are the ones whose memories seem to me often like what you get when you start rotating a kaleidoscope: patterns and then different patterns from the same ingredients, all captivating, without there ever being one you could settle on as ‘real’. I’ve heard them tell me stories about when we were children that I know are almost complete fantasies – if only because sometimes each of them tells me something different about the same thing.

I thought of how it was for my father after the war and what had happened to his Polish family, his country, his home, his new family in Scotland, his freedom and his future. I could see at once, looking into the mirror, why my father didn’t think, why he liked to live his life automatically. I could see why he didn’t seem to have any background. I could see why he hadn’t wanted to come back to the city where his sister died like that and his family had behaved like that, and given him something to do that had almost been the end of him.
For me, growing up with him in London there had been facts, like he was born in Krakow, and signs like the way he went to church or how he’d decorate the house at Christmas. But with him unable to hold a story of his life together there hadn’t been anybody doing that, in a position to tell me why life was like that, and how different so much of my experience was from a boy whose father had been born in England.

All of these years, I realised, I had felt in some way foreign.
Landing in Krakow, there I was, invited into my father’s world for what seemed like the first time. I may have felt foreign because of the un-Englishness that inflected everything my father did in England; but as I was understanding, there was more to it even than that. We had thought in different languages. Most of the things that came to him in English (what people said to him and what he did in England Scotland) I wouldn’t have wanted to come to me. The things that had come to him in Polish, in the Polish environment, as a child and a young man, before the war, these were different.

Being Polish also meant there was something else to him before the war, prison and everything else and it was something that the English world couldn’t get at. It seems that it had been hidden away, maybe on purpose but more likely cut off without my father even realising it, unthought about in the way that almost every aspect of his life came to be. He became a kind of machine that cut off: a sort of bench-saw (he had one: a large and noisy one that you could hear a mile away on Sunday mornings) to the present moment, slicing through connections before they spurred him into reflection. He kept his connection to something of the past through all those nods to his childhood I had been caught up in, consciously and unconsciously, but the middle past, his years in Britain, he couldn’t go there.

Today as I move through Krakow things keep coming to me. People start to speak to me, unprompted, in ways I am not used to. They talk in Polish, thinking I am one of them in ways, as far as I remember, that few English folk ever have.
I’m told I look foreign. Here, in Krakow, whatever that means doesn’t seem to apply. I feel as if I belong here, even though I know hardly any Polish.

But even this changes. On the tram I listen to some children counting and realise I know how to count in Polish. I remember a Polish woman staying with us as a child teaching me some of the words, and then my father carrying on, teaching me in the car as we drive to his warehouse at London Bridge.

And as the tram across Krakow I find myself staring. That tree must have been a hundred years old: Dad would have seen it. Those buildings, they’re really old. He must have walked past them. That park. He must have walked there. That crack in the wall. The face on that statue. The curve of that street. The rise of that hill.

As a teenager I had given up trying to work out what was on my father’s mind, but here I am with his thoughts, without even trying. Here I am in Poland with my father, the two of us holding things together somehow. Maybe it’s something we can bear.