Game Day on Oblomov Street

Olga Svoboda, aged eighty-one, two years a widow, and her son Tilas, aged fifty-nine (divorced thirty years ago) lived together on Oblomov Street in Sydney’s west. Oblomov Street ran from a railway station to a stadium that, since its refurbishment ten years ago, had been the home ground of a popular Sydney soccer team.

On game days, late in the afternoon when the first supporters walked past their house towards the stadium, Tilas, watching for them from his recliner in the lounge-room, would announce to his mother, “The entertainment’s started!” Olga would get the coffee percolating while Tilas fetched two folding chairs and a small table from the garage, setting them up on the front lawn.

Happy, excited supporters thronged past Tilas and Olga towards the stadium. As dusk fell, residents in the street turned on fairy lights threaded along their front fences. Some houses had sophisticated laser light displays sending bright colourful beams into the enveloping canopy of the large plane trees growing along the footpath. Olga and Tilas had fairy lights along the pickets of their front fence and more fairy lights on their veranda. Their near neighbours and closest friends, Mr and Mrs Fazio, had green, white and red lights set in their garden to shine the Italian colours on the facade of their house. On game days Oblomov Street became a festive funnel of colour, light, movement and people.

But the first season had been hard for all the residents. Late-comers parked in their driveways, blocking access for the next two or three hours. There were angry confrontations. And after the game, departing fans left litter in the street and tossed rubbish into front yards. Quickly, out of necessity, the residents of Oblomov Street accommodated themselves to the Saturday evening crowds. They parked their own cars in their driveways on game days. They put their wheelie bins, lids open, at their front fences so litter could be thrown away without messing the street or their gardens.

After only three or four Saturdays, neighbourhood children had started modest driveway stalls selling cupcakes, muffins, plastic cups of cold cordial or frozen juice-stix. By the mid-point of the second season, the stalls had become almost sophisticated. Extension cords powered lights, bar fridges and food-warmers. When the kids began to make serious money, their parents got involved, cooking for them, setting up the stalls and rigging the light displays. The fans enjoyed their walk along Oblomov Street, pausing to buy food and chat with the residents. Without council rules, mediators or community liaison officers, the householders and fans found ways to share the street and even thrive together.

This afternoon—like every other game day—Tilas went to the Fazios’ while his mother made coffee. The Fazios’ grand-daughters, Valentina and Angelica, identical twins with olive skin, cascading ringlets of dark hair, large brown eyes and long legs they complemented with short skirts, had a popular driveway stall selling their grandmother’s delicious cannoli. Their stall was always crowded with young male fans. The twins’ father, big, burly Joseph, owner of a tiling business, hovered nearby making sure nothing untoward was said to his daughters. Joe greeted Tilas in Italian and put his arm around his shoulder in frank affection. The two men had known each other for decades.

“Are these cannoli as sweet as you, princess?” a tall, skinny floppy-fringed teenage boy with a team flag over his shoulder said to Tina. Tilas could tell Tina from Angie only because Tina had a dark mole on her cheek near her mouth. Both girls were looking their best, their youthful beauty augmented by crimson lipstick, a hint of eye-shadow and mascara.

“She hasn’t got a sweet bone in her body,” Angie butted in. “She’s all exoskeleton, like a scorpion!”

The teenage boy had no answer. Tina flashed a bright smile at him and looked at him expectantly, waiting for his retort. His confidence evaporated. He smiled weakly, paid for his cannoli and stepped away. His friends, laughing, slapped him on the back of the head. “Nice try, Romeo! You need better material than that lame line!” he was told.

Watching and listening closely, Joe caught Tilas’s eye. Joe allowed himself a smile. Tilas nodded, amused.

Old Mr and Mrs Fazio, like neighbourhood royalty, were sitting on the front veranda of their green-white-and-red-lit house. Tilas smiled and waved to them, and then greeted Tina and Angie. He paid his twenty dollars and got four cannoli on a paper plate. Joe reached forward, took the tongs from Angie and gave him two more cannoli.

Overtaken by dozens of fans walking quickly to the stadium to get good seats, Tilas returned to his mother, who had their coffee ready on the front yard table. He sat beside her. He patted her hand as he often did when he had something particular to say to her.

“Have you seen Angelica and Tina lately?” he asked. “They’ve changed from being stick-insects to glamorous young women in just a year or two.”

“That’s what teenage girls do,” his mother said. “I’ll walk up later and say hello to them. See for myself.”

“Those girls must be richer than Solomon. I counted ten trays of cannoli, ten per tray at five dollars each. Five hundred dollars every game day!”

“The beauty of the cash economy,” Olga said.

Two hours later the game was over, and Tilas and Olga, still sitting on the lawn, enjoying the warm evening, were drinking wine. There was always some amusing banter among the fans as they headed home. Game days were a treat: Olga and Tilas sat in their front yard, ate cannoli and sipped coffee and then wine, happy that regular entertainment had come to them with minimum effort on their part.

“Minimum effort” could have been their motto. Tilas drove their Hyundai hatchback, Olga beside him checking her shopping list, once a fortnight to the mall. A greater load of groceries each fortnight was less burdensome than a weekly trip. They paid a teenage lad to mow their lawn and trim the edges for them. Even though Tilas had for thirty-two years been a cataloguer at Burwood Public Library, since his retirement he hadn’t once used the library. Why get into the traffic snarls along Parramatta Road if you didn’t have to? He and Olga read the hundreds of books they had in the house. They liked the same type of books, mostly detective fiction, preferably with some comedy, and nothing too disturbing.

Most evenings, Olga and Tilas watched an episode of Montalbano on DVD. Sitting in recliners, a block of chocolate between them, Tilas said to his mother, “We’re two more heart attacks waiting to happen.”

“Yes, but old age is so much work. And great old age issa hassle.”

Tilas smiled. The English expression sounded odd coming from an elderly Czech woman. He looked at her: her pale skin deeply creased, her wavy hair now silver, her glasses and hearing-aid essential, she was getting shorter but plumper. Tilas patted his own soft belly and rubbed his whiskered double-chin.

Two years ago, Tilas’s father Milos had a heart attack and died, aged eighty-three. Olga found him in the backyard. After the simplest of funeral services, Milos was cremated. He’d seemed in reasonable health although undoubtedly obese. But there’d been no lingering illness; no extended stays in hospital; no daily plethora of pills. Instead, he died quickly and quietly at home.

“He always was a sensible man,” Olga commented months later. She and Tilas talked about sorting out his belongings, but why bother? They liked having his aftershave, toothbrush and combs in the bathroom cabinet, his shoes and clothes in the wardrobe, and the books he’d enjoyed—which they enjoyed too—slumping sideways on the bookshelves in the living room.

“Minimum effort” also applied to their religious observances. They went only to Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday Masses in a neighbouring parish where the unfashionable Latin Rite was still observed. Olga said she went twice a year, to honour the Church which had shown courage in Czechoslovakia under the Soviets, but she didn’t go more often, to protest the folly of the Church changing with the times. After Easter Mass, the first without Milos, Olga—leaning on Tilas’s arm—said, “Don’t the bishops understand? Don’t they know their own business? People don’t go to Mass because it’s relevant. They go because it’s timeless.” She’d spoken in Czech, reverting to her native language, as Milos used to do, when expressing intimate or heartfelt matters.

Tilas patted her hand. “Mama, maybe we should become Buddhists.” He pointed to a statue of Buddha, fat and somnolent, next to an azalea bush in a front garden. “They seem to have found a way to make immobility and indolence into virtues.”

Olga chuckled, imagining her tall, middle-aged, overweight, lazy son, his head shaved, in saffron robes. She said, “Changing religion upsets your whole life and all your habits. Do you have the energy for that?”

“No,” Tilas admitted, sighing. “Getting to Mass twice a year is strenuous enough.”

Olga and Milos, with eight-year-old Tilas, had arrived in Sydney after escaping Czechoslovakia in 1969. Milos, an accountant, worked as a builder’s labourer on sites around Sydney. In 1975, he bought the house on Oblomov Street. The Fazios had recently moved into their house. The two migrant families quickly bonded. They helped renovate each other’s kitchen, bathroom and laundry. The Fazio family stayed enterprising and energetic, unlike the Svobodas. When Milos was promoted to the company office to administer wages and later promoted again to manage the company’s finances, he and Olga felt secure. They gratefully embraced ease.

An only child, Tilas was indulged and fussed over. He had a happy childhood and repaid his parents with life-long care and loyalty. As a young man he thought that perhaps a wife would be as good as his parents, or even better. Tilas married in his mid-twenties but he quickly realised marriage didn’t suit him at all. He wasn’t ready for the endless work of talking, deciding, compromising and visiting noisy, hyper-active in-laws. He resisted having children or buying a house. His wife started divorce proceedings before their fourth wedding anniversary. Tilas didn’t blame her. He rented a single-bedroom unit closer to his parents and lived there for the next twenty-seven years. He realised that sex and naivety had made a fool of him, and he wasn’t fooled again.

At work, Tilas was regarded as aloof. In fact, he was a listener and observer rather than a talker and doer. He was tall and solidly built, so he looked down on the library’s mostly female staff, and his slight accent, together with a way of looking at people in a fixed manner (for years he’d delayed going to an optometrist to have his sight problems corrected by glasses) made him seem a little unfriendly. He wore faded trousers and sweat-stained shirts to work, seemingly unaware that his clothes were no longer presentable. And he let his hair grow for months, resplendent with dandruff, before getting a severe crew-cut. When library staff commented, Tilas would tell them, “I joined the French Foreign Legion.” When he was older, fatter, his hair grey and often uncombed, the habit accentuated his oddity.

Over the years in the library’s staff-room he’d seen and heard the talkers and the doers shout and swear at each other, almost coming to blows (and much of this between professionals) over politics or current affairs. Tilas liked the Australian saying: arguments were “dust-ups.”

At lunch-time, Tilas went to a park to eat the Chiko roll and chocolate-iced donut he bought every day. Library staff assumed Tilas didn’t much like their company. It wasn’t that. He doubted many of the aims and activities that other people considered unquestionably necessary and good, but he couldn’t be bothered to share this position. And it seemed pointless to explain it to anybody. They might want to argue the point!

Late in his library career, cataloguing a book on medical stuff-ups, he called with loud enthusiasm across the workroom, “People! Here is a good word!” A few people looked up, frowning, from their computer screens. “Iatrogenics: the harm caused by those who think they are helping.”

Nobody said anything. Two of the younger staff looked at each other and grinned, but Tilas didn’t see them. He chuckled at his discovery.

After his father’s death, Tilas returned home to comfort his mother. He gave up his unit and retired from the library. Olga made one change: she threw out Tilas’s shabby clothes and told him to buy new clothes. He made two changes: he put on fifteen kilos and he started vegetable gardening. In the backyard he got a landscape gardener to build raised garden beds using thick, treated sleepers and fill them with soil.

Tilas announced to his mother, “I am a farmer now.”

Olga said, “You are a peasant now.”

Tilas merely poked seeds into the soil with his finger, turned on a sprinkler, and let “God and the sun do the work.” He discovered that growing broccoli and cauliflower wasn’t worth the fuss—grubs made them inedible without a regime of pesticides. But beans, tomatoes, carrots, zucchinis, parsley and potatoes all thrived with little attention or effort. A passion-fruit vine flourished without his help, as did a lemon tree and a fig tree. Tilas planted the young trees a month apart because he had to dig sizeable holes for them. Plus they had to be watered. This sort of intense work needed to be spaced out.

Once a week or so, Tilas would come inside from his easy-care garden with a basket full of beans, radishes, passion-fruit, a half dozen carrots, and show his mother. He leaned towards her, kissed her on top of her head, and said, “Peasants rejoice! Harvest Festival is here!”

Last Sunday, the morning after game day, the peasants weren’t rejoicing. After a good sleep-in and a breakfast cooked for him by his mother, Tilas went to pack away the two chairs and table from the front yard. He saw a steady stream of people, many wearing black or red t-shirts and some among them carrying megaphones, walking past towards the stadium. Protesters. One of them put a leaflet in his letterbox despite the No Junk Mail notice. The stream of protesters petered out. Tilas put the table and chairs in the garage, and took the leaflet from the letterbox. It announced: A day of action for the newly-formed Future Now Collective—a coalition of artists, academics, activists and human rights advocates united for change. A better tomorrow is possible. Business as usual is no longer an option. Rally now to demand a sustainable, equal, inclusive, globalised world!

He didn’t want his mother to read it; she’d heard similar sentiments in Czecho­slovakia decades ago. He screwed up the leaflet and put it in the wheelie bin. He saw another clutch of black-and-red-clad people, carrying placards and black-and-red flags, coming along the footpath.

Tilas moved quicker than he’d moved for years. He ran out the garden hose and sprinkler to the front fence. He dashed back to the tap and turned it on. A wide sweep of water fell heavily across the footpath. He looked along the street—the protesters were passing the Fazios’ house. He scurried to the back of the house, went inside and closed the blinds in the lounge-room.

He was puffing. Olga was alarmed to see Tilas red-faced and perspiring, peeking through the blinds.

“What are you doing? What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m watering the lawn and the roses. I’m checking the sprinkler is working.”

It was working. The protesters, inconvenienced, had to walk on the road, away from the house. Tilas was pleased with his small act of disassociation.

“But you’re pink and breathing strangely,” his mother said, looking earnestly at him.

“It’s hot outside. That’s why I’ve got the sprinkler going.”

“Hmmm. I’ve just made coffee. I’ll get it. Sit down and rest.”

Tilas sat down in his recliner and wiped his face with a handkerchief. He was sweating profusely. It was hot outside. From the kitchen Olga called, “Would you like a Tim-Tam with the coffee?”

“Yes, Mama, two, or maybe three, please.”

He felt he’d earned them.

Gary Furnell lives in rural New South Wales. His book The Hardest Path is the Easiest: Exploring the Wisdom Literature with Pascal, Burke, Kierkegaard and Chesterton was published last year by Connor Court. His most recent story in Quadrant was “Who’s Out in Heaven?” in the December issue