at the beach

At the very last day at Le Gurp we said good bye to the beach. My father found a good place for a camp fire south of the old bunker, admonishing of his father's fainted fascist world. As the orange golden flames flickered and licked their way into the darkening soft night, lit only by the sound of waves and travelling stars, I heard more stories in the silence. My father was always so brave and so tall, he knew so much and kept so much to himself. We were just sitting around the fire, faces dipped halfway into a vivid dancing glow, halfway into the foggy kiss of a growing beach night.
I believe it was 11 PM when we first heard the sound of the didgeridoo. It was as if it was coming from another world, from withing the bunker and the teenagers from further away seemed to fade away with their beer and their laughing and their 'killing me softly' rotating on the ghettoblaster.
This was before I knew it was 1995, it was just a number then and Lauryn Hill not even a name. New Zealand, didgeridoos and fires in the night held a place in my flaming imagination though and stories of aborigines and a deep love for this world.
The man approached us when dad beckoned him to come.
I didn't know my dad then. I had no idea. Vaguely only had he told stories of his past, of running across Europe and an Irish maiden and his first kiss in Rome in the Colosseum. And how mom abducted him, kidnapped him like a real heroe would do, she saved him and she took him far, far away into a new life that created us and our story and our night at the beach.
The guy appeared slowly, as if an invisible quarryman chiseled him out of the dark boulder that was the night into the dancing light of our little refuge.
His hair hung all the way down over his shoulders and he had a long beard. His eyes were sparkeling like a nightstar and his voice was very low and soft.
Dad invited him to sit with us and he played for us, as the nightwind and the atlantic waves and the love swayed us into a rhythm that doesn't know words.
Stories spilled over, that I didn't understand. I was too young but very impressionable. I had no idea. No idea, how my dad saw this guy, how this was a milestone maybe in my dad's long way to meet us, to come, with his story in his hands. It was a sharing beyond my comprehension, a relict of his life, a lost thread of long hair and fires in the night. The simple berber's life. The romantic veil covering a past too harsh and too strange to be told in fiction.

He was brave, my dad, we slept in the dunes. In the middle of the night there was loud noise, fighting, drunken craze. My dad ushered us to the car, hiding behind the sandwaves, crawling back to get Juli's shawl. It was dangerous and I didn't know why, I had no idea, I trusted in life and in my dad and that everything would always be alright and the same. Ever changing but never bad.
After a long long drive we stopped on a side dirt road where my dad peed for three minutes. It must have been a relief beyond just emptying his bladder. It just didn't seem to stop. I marveled at this and everything else that was.
A night in the dunes. A long haired didgeridoo man straight out of the bunker and the sand. Evil young people drunk and dangerous, breaking into a kiosk at the beach at night. Us crawling to the car my dad racing away. Juli crying, her shawl was missing. My hero dad crawling back. His voice so low and whispered. Hush, hush, lullaby.