Poems from the Funeral 1/6

Who’s Turning the Kaleidoscope? Kaleidoscopic fragments of your war-time years spin through my mind: starting Medicine at the Sorbonne, black-marketed nylons and cigarettes, Mercedes hidden in haystacks, people hidden in haystacks poked by bayonets, men in a boat, you amongst them, betrayed by a girl one of them slept with – one of you, I should perhaps say, though I never have till now… The mouth of a cave blackened by gun-powder - yours or your enemy’s? Someone’s ambush. Having to dig a trench – or was it a pit? then line up, all of you, along the edge, machine-guns at your backs: shrapnel in your legs saw you fall with the others, but the miracle was you did not suffocate before the guerrillas found you and one other out of all that lot. Someone has pointed out that you don’t get shrapnel from machine-guns. That’s right, I realise. Don’t know any more if it’s your kaleidoscope or mine that has mingled the fragments, but I do remember those unusual scars on your shins. I remember that word and I have watched your tormented sleep. The camps, you being nick-named Ghandhi after release – so thin from typhoid. You a translator, relied on for your eight languages, able to get privileges – was this the time of nylons, cigarettes and Mercedes? You hungry and unemployed in Paris. No benefits to refuse in the France of ’45. For the Stateless Person: No job without a permit to stay, (I have your Permis de Sejour still) No permit to stay without a job. You spent all day in one queue, next day in the other, you told me. Queue-jumping, meaning refusal to queue, has become a catchword of blame in Australian politics, you might be interested to know, though many of the countries to which it is applied have no queues for people to join. In one of the camps, a woman and child, a little boy you’d later adopt, a beautiful woman you’d later marry. He stuck with you because you stuck with him when she did not. And now he is our family, though you are gone. A child’s satin-covered missal from his first communion holds your joint naturalisation papers: talismans of your new life. He leaves it in my care. Trusts me with that and other things. On his rare trips north, he used to arrive sometimes unannounced, but we came to know who would be sleeping in any van with the dashboard smothered in fallen blooms. Stone-mason sings: At the end of all this, I’ll scoop up frangipanni – handfuls, armfuls, facefuls of fragrant white and gold, cool suede, rich and fresh. In my bed I’ll roll in it, crush its beauty for my own like a cat in catnip.