Papa Stalin

I own a few hectares of land in Central Victoria. I bought it on a whim a few years ago and ever since I’ve imagined building a stone cottage there, some private fortress hidden from the world. A place to retreat to when the apartment finally caves in around me from mould and neglect. Sometimes I wake up wheezing and think: this place is killing me slowly.

I still believe human connection matters. I learned the alternative the hard way. The impact of isolation doesn’t arrive all at once. It accumulates quietly, like damp and mould. Some dreams refuse to dissolve. I’ve woken to angels with a thousand serrated teeth standing at the foot of my bed. Other times there are shapes in the hallway, patient and silent, waiting to strike.

We were meant to eat apples and lie in the sun. Instead we live beside freeways and trade forty hours a week for two days of exhaustion.

I used to read constantly. A book a week, sometimes two. Then something in my brain switched. Anhedonia maybe. Laziness. Some low-grade radiation poisoning. My apartment is filled with books anyway. They multiplied in stacks beside the bed, beneath tables, along the walls.

At work I started a little library program. I printed a sign with Frog and Toad riding a bicycle and wrote out the rules beneath it, genuinely believing people would return what they borrowed. Most of the good books vanished within a month. Not that I would’ve read them again, but that wasn’t the point.

I still collect books compulsively. Like stray cats, they find their way inside eventually. I keep telling myself I’ll return to reading properly one day, with concentration instead of skimming pages while my mind drifts elsewhere, usually to upsetting and dark places.

Writing narrative fiction defeats me. Every attempt collapses under its own falseness. Everything sounds invented because it is. So instead I write down things that actually happened: the time a stripper pissed into my beer at a party, or the night I accidentally pissed down a girl’s throat in the backseat of my car after too many pints of Guinness. I warned her beforehand to stop.

Most nights I play the What If game.

What if I’d studied in Hungary.

What if I’d invested in Nvidia or Apple instead of gambling my money away.

What if I’d moved slower and not frightened her off.

What if I didn’t have worm DNA.

It’s a game for losers. A form of self-harm disguised as reflection. There’s no use screaming at the clouds once you’re already caught in the rain. As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.

My grandfather grew up without a father in Soviet-occupied Hungary. At school enormous portraits of Joseph Stalin hung above the classrooms. His teacher told him he did have a father after all: Stalin, the great man of the age.

His mother, Róza, believed castor oil could cure almost anything. Whenever he became sick she forced spoonfuls of it into him.

I met her once near the end of her life. She was tiny and skeletal and attached to an oxygen mask that fogged slightly each time she breathed. She smiled at me anyway. Before I left, she gave me a stuffed toy dog. I gave her a cheap pin badge I’d bought somewhere and she acted as though it were a precious stone.

Years later my greyhound found the toy in a box beneath my bed and tore it apart. I remember staring at him, unable to speak.

Dogs don’t understand sentimentality.

It wouldn’t have made sense to explain what he’d destroyed.

Imagine Stalin’s final hours. He lay collapsed on the floor of his dacha while guards lingered outside, too terrified to enter the room without permission. By then doctors had begun disappearing into prisons and basements, especially Jewish doctors. Nobody wanted to wake the bear and discover it had only been sleeping.

In the end he died alone anyway.

The toy survived Hungary, migration, illness, time.

It didn’t survive the dog.