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“I’m intuitively suspicious of people,” my father is saying, on the phone, six hundred and thirty-five miles away. I can picture him, his towering frame, more frail at eighty-two, hyper-fixating on organizing some persimmons on the windowsill in the small sunny kitchen that has just enough room to turn around and get what you need from the countertop to the stove to the small table at which he is about to sit down to give me his full attention. I am interviewing him for an academic thesis towards the completion of my master’s degree in applied linguistics – a thesis around the effects of language and identity loss on a person, and for this specific story that person is my father.

 

“People will disappoint me if I get to know them, you know,” he says. That’s all he says, as if it’s an obvious statement without any further explanation. I can hear him shuffling around, arranging the bright orange persimmons on his windowsill. I inherited this fascination of arranging small things in the sun by a window. It makes me happy as it makes my father happy and so I can depend on his mood right now as I initiate questions.

 

I let my mind drift back to my childhood. My father also holds a fear of sharing things with people, which I suppose is what he is talking about. My mother’s social anxiety would kick in whenever we were around others and she would overshare out of nervousness, divulging how my father was from Yugoslavia, but that the family is now in Germany, explaining that it was really complicated and that her husband who was in earshot probably wouldn’t want all of this told to strangers anyway. Later my father would lecture her that, indeed, it’s never okay to share these kinds of details with strangers. Ever, he would add, shaking his long finger at her.

 

“You’re being ridiculous,” she would say with that indignant tone we were all used to hearing when the battle of the verbal ping-pong would begin. “What’s the big deal?” That would infuriate him more that she couldn’t see what the big problem was. It was entirely shocking to him that she would say the things she would in public and she would push back, doing it every time and at some point in the arguments in private would tell him he was being neurotic and tell him that he should really read The Balkans (referring to the widely acclaimed 726-page book by Misha Glenny about the centuries-long human conflict in the Balkan region) in order to understand where his neurosis came from.

 

This was their dance we were used to as kids: provocation, anger, and fanning of the flames that eventually culminated with our mother pulling out some intellectual card from her back pocket to which my father responded that he didn’t need to read a book to know what he was talking about. As a child, I learned to tiptoe around my father’s story and identity, and his anger, and we were only really talking about any of the details now, here, on the phone, as he arranged his persimmons.

 

My father has great charm and everyone who meets him tells me how funny he is or how interesting it was to talk to him with the very little he let through. He has a fantastic sense of humor and lets you in with his words right away. Maybe it’s the you know? that he ends every sentence with, drawing people in as if they have a connection.

 

But he doesn’t really get to know anyone.

 

“I never learned to trust people,” my father says. “How could I coming out of that environment?” He is talking about his childhood, and that environment means many things that he has perhaps only briefly acknowledged with his own parents, his sisters, and likely in most great detail with my mother, his confidant. That environment means the starvation camp he and his family were sent to during World War II by the Nazi and Serb forces of which he has buried the memories of the atrocities he witnessed as a young child; that environment means the angry and punitive society that his family was released back out into as some of the few survivors of the camp – classrooms where he was beaten for not being an ethnically pure Serb during the rise of nationalism and ethnic cleansing; and, that environment also meant the angry and destitute home life as his father struggled to keep the family alive during deportations to UN-sanctioned camps and eventually refugee housing. That environment is meant to sum up a violent and displaced childhood – a miserable childhood lacking nurture and joy.

 

I am not sure how much to ask, or, how to ask it, but he has agreed to talk to me about this now, for my project, and this is the first I am hearing full sentences about his thoughts on his childhood coming from an ethnically complicated lineage during a politically complicated and violent time in history. “The problem was that I was neither German, nor Serbian, nor Hungarian – I didn’t know what I was. You see, wherever I lived, I was always a stranger” he goes on. “I was a stranger in a strange land – I even feel today like that.”

 

I ask him if the family ever had conversations about what was going on during this time. It’s a long shot, but I am scanning for examples from my memory of reading memoir accounts of families in wartime, hoping to drum up an example or two.

 

“My parents were just in survival mode,” he says and I feel almost silly for asking the question from my podium on the emotionally sensitive stage that is the current time we are living in here in the US. “Nobody ever asked me how I felt or what I thought, or if I was going through a hard time,” he says in a tone hinting at mockery. “I was not taught to communicate, you know?” I can tell that the organization of the persimmons is coming to a close and soon so will this phone call, as his tolerance for going back in time is limited.

 

I consider my own childhood, as the daughter of this man who was never taught to share or process his own feelings – who was, in his words – “a totally disturbed kid” by the time he was twelve years old. I think of how it could have been for me and my sister, and how it was.

 

No one ever came into our house. My parents didn’t have any friends. The story went that when I was born, my mother threatened my father that it was either his drinking life at the bars, or her, My mother had come from a long line of alcoholics and my father was a self-described addict, so rather than continue the cycle of addiction, they isolated themselves.

 

My father eventually built his own small construction business and everyone he worked with, and still works with today after decades, he claims that he does not trust. I bring this to his attention. “You had to trust people to some extent,” I insist.

 

“I know exactly when and how they are going to lie to me,” he says, “I know their weaknesses and when and how they’re going to screw me,” he continues, “and that is what I can trust.”

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