Mighty Oak Felled (updated Dec23)

 

 

Our big Croat-Russian Ivo might be down for the count. Ran into his nephew collecting belongings for the run to the hospital. Couple nights before his uncle had fallen in the hallway of his house and not wearing his emergency buzzer wasn't found until morning. Broken hip. Three years ago he had broken the other. Since the return, four visits had been made to the house without sighting the old man. On the last we had spoken through the curtained living-room window and then the screen-door, both having left old Ivan invisible... Who are you? What do you want? Idi u picku materinu! Go to the cunt of your mother!... Six year absence, Ivo struggled to identify the voice. After all the home invasions of the last number of years in Melbourne the elderly were extremely wary. Surprising tears for the old man. Perhaps it was the buried echo of mother's fondness for good, firm, honourable Ivo. One of the earliest memories was his carting concrete paving blocks he had made around at his place over for the Montenegrin widow. Around the side mother wanted them, Ivo wheeling his barrow as directed. At his house beside the milk-bar around the corner we were petted by Rose, Ivo's Bulgarian partner. An architect who designed Ivo's house, Rose was treated shabbily by the big lanky Croat; and told exactly that by the neighbouring widow. A postcard was sent from Singapore, though Ivica returned to mind more often than that. Over a number of years in his back sunroom fine, unsugared moonshine of Ivo’s brought tales from earlier days. The station-master father in the Croatian capital misted the eyes of the old storyteller. During WWII Ivo's father, a communist sympathiser, needed to keep his nose clean. One day young Ivica returning from mass told of Cardinal Stepinac's blessing of the Ustashi troops that were preparing for engagement. At one of our houses, where in the early-60s the newly arrived migrants were tightly packed—like in a piggery, Ivo described it—Ivan earned a punch on the nose from a Croat boarder, who didn't like his countryman's politics. Ivo was proud of his putative Russian ancestry. A gravely wounded soldier in the war against Napoleon had managed to reach Zagreb, where he founded the Kombol line.