| Contents > Coffee at Nanna’s by Danuta Shaw |
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Coffee at Nanna’s
There is something Grimms fairytale about my Nanna’s house, with its leadlight windows, dark red bricks, tall white pillars and compressed garden beds brimming with spring flowers. As in a fairy-tale, her house is tiny but large at the same time. I imagine that I might be Little Red Riding Hood at the cottage door: Nanna’s place is familiar in the eternal way that memory makes what changes unchangeable. It smells of her, of my long dead Polish grandfather, Dzadek, and of many of the events that I have lived. No other place smells like that for me: as a place her home is the only remaining link to my childhood.
“It’s me,” I call out. It is a ritual not to say who I am. I assume she knows my voice. She doesn’t ask who, because only a stranger, or the Big Bad Wolf, would give his name.
“You coming?” She has a sing-song tone. “I still in nighty.”
Academics write about ethnicity being performative. Anne Brewster explains that diasporic people, like myself, alter their behaviour depending on function and intention (Brewster, 1991:13). Here, at Nanna’s front door, I am performing the role of good Polish grand-daughter.
Mary down the road walks by and says “See, you visit Nanna, eh! She lucky woman!”
Yet, even while I am cloaked in my ‘Polish-ness’, I smile a very Australian smile, one spurred by the humour resonating through Nanna’s mining of the English language. Nobody can see my self-reflexive joy, and I make sure it’s gone before Nanna finally schleps her way to the door. I couldn’t bear to have her detect anything approaching sarcasm in my real love of all her mannerisms. She rattles at keys – the keys that make her feel safe – and then complains about how long it takes to unlock things.
“See, I not up yet.” Many Australians still mistake awkward language for stupidity. Nanna’s English is broken after fifty years in Australia, but not because she is ignorant. She has learnt many languages, though it is true that the older you are when you learn the harder it is to make a new language work (Ervin-Tripp, 2001:1) and English was a late addition to her repertoire. She learnt German, Polish and her few words of Italian and Russian at a much earlier age. I can’t know what she was like then; it was long before I was around; but I find myself looking at her, at myself, through the way that we are reflected in each other.
Now Nanna is older and smaller, not just because I have grown. Shrinking from five-foot-two down to four-foot-eight reveals the calcium deficiency in her diet during her twenties. Like wrinkles and smile lines around the eyes, our bodies keep records of who we are and what we have done. Today, as she opens the door, keys shake in one hand while the other pulls at the lacy lapel of her pink chenille dressing gown and covers the tiny ruffles of flannelette nighty peeking from her neckline. She smiles, her eyes as bright as those of my six year-old daughter, Ka’yil. Shaking her head, she unlocks the security door.
“Don’t worry. Don’t worry. You’re here. Come in.”
“Still in bed… Still in bed, Danuta,” she tells me again, just as she will tell me again when we sit down in the kitchen, and then again before we leave. “I get up early, and so raining. I go back to bed.” Then, without pausing for breath, she asks “So, what you do? Where you been?”
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| Contents > Coffee at Nanna’s by Danuta Shaw |