Previous
Chapter 4: My Father’s People
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Reckoning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Legacy
Morality, Survival, and Perspective
Sexuality and Shame
Body Image and Publicity
Indifference vs. Feeling
Summary
Analysis
Magda is born in Liverpool on April 12, 1961, the same day that Yuri Gagarin made humans’ first trip into space. While pregnant, Margaret has toxemia—a disease that saps nutrients from the fetus—so Magda is born two weeks early. Peter and Margaret’s first son, John, was stillborn due to toxemia. The stillbirth devastated Peter, who had lost his family and his country, and he never forgot holding John’s tiny casket on his lap. Besides John, Magda has two older siblings, Barb and Chris. Magda idolizes Barb and Chris and wears their hand-me-downs proudly. As Barb and Chris grow up, Magda is left on her own; she begs her mother for a sibling but must entertain herself with her own imagination.
The defining features of Magda’s childhood are a shift toward modernity and a strong sense of loneliness. While the death of Margaret and Peter’s first child is a continuation of the loss that has defined Margaret’s family’s life up to this point, Magda’s birth is a miracle—a sign of a healthier, stabler world and future. The simultaneous space expedition symbolizes a generation in which people will travel far, doing things no one has done. In the midst of her loneliness, therefore, Magda feels a call to bravery and to change the world.
Themes
Early on, Margaret observes that Magda is “one for the world.” Despite Margaret’s Catholic instinct to stamp out her children’s notions that they are special, Magda grows up liking to entertain others. However, she is also anxious and particular, often falling into dark moods and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.
Early on, Magda has a conflict in her nature. While she is confident and extroverted, her anxiety works against these to isolate her. If Magda is to be “one for the world,” she has to reckon with the side of herself that founders in a personal darkness.
Themes
Soon, a job overseeing quality control in a nylon factory brings Peter to Australia. During the 1960s, when human-made surfaces were first invented, there were many jobs for technologists of textiles such as rayon and polyester. Peter’s obsessive attention to detail—in contrast to Magda’s messy nature—makes him perfect for the job.
The quotidian factory setting belies the skill and mindset that made Peter a military assassin. Though on the surface he appears to be an average, working-class man, in reality, Peter is capable of extreme political protest and violence—a fact that gives Peter an unsettlingly two-faced nature.
Themes
When the war ended, Peter wanted to become an Englishman. In a Prisoner of War camp, Peter learned English. Russians had freed him from the camp, but it was two American pilots who helped him to safety. Peter then made his way to the UK and attended Edinburgh’s Polish School of Medicine—a school that the Scottish government formed in lieu of the destroying Poland’s schools. Three years into Peter’s degree, however, Scotland became frustrated that there were now so many Polish people competing with Scottish people for jobs, and the government closed the school. Disappointed but not bitter, Peter went to Bradford to study textile chemistry; his mathematics and fashion notebooks show meticulous and artistic flair. After earning his degree, Peter worked in several textile factories before taking a job in Liverpool.
Peter wishes to become an Englishman not out of dislike for Poland. In fact, during the war, Peter demonstrated intense patriotism. Instead, Peter aspires to become an Englishman out of necessity. During the war, any academic hopes that Peter may have had were paused. And even after the war, schools lay in ruins. The war didn’t destroy Peter’s Polish pride—rather, it deprived the country of resources and infrastructure necessary for its citizens to live fulfilling lives there.
Themes
Get the entire Reckoning LitChart as a printable PDF.
In Liverpool, the Szubanskis lived in a small house in a conventional neighborhood. Magda remembers a neighbor who gave her cherry tomatoes, learning to read from a blackboard in the kitchen, and finding a gas mask (that looks like an alien’s face) in the attic.
From a young age, Magda perceives the specter of war that hangs over her past. The gas mask’s alien appearance represents the curious and unnatural nature of war to younger generations who didn’t experience war directly.
Themes
Every summer, Magda’s family goes to Dunfermline to stay with Meg; Magda remembers the windy roads, and the smell of her grandmother’s floors. Then, Meg moves to Liverpool; she and Magda share a room and are best friends. Meg doesn’t tell on Magda when Magda once wet her pants; she takes care of Magda when she is sick and rides the bus downtown with her every week. Magda thinks that things will never change, but Margaret went to a fortuneteller who claimed that the family would move far away and that something bad would happen to Peter.
Magda’s and Margaret’s different perspectives on the future reflect their respective exposures to hardship. As a young girl unexperienced in war, poverty, or oppression, Magda views the world as perfect and unchangeable. On the other hand, Margaret, in going to the fortuneteller in the first place, shows that she change and is prepared for the worse—an attitude the war instilled within her.
Themes
In keeping with the postwar efforts to “populate or perish,” Australia avidly campaigned for people to leave Europe for the golden beaches of Australia. Magda’s family fell for this propaganda, even though they were already familiar with beaches: once, they cut a Christmas tree from the British coast and later dancing around it while snow fell in the window. But Peter hated Britain’s cold winters; they reminded him of wrapping newspaper around his toes to prevent frostbite on frigid nights during the war; therefore, he coveted the dry, sunny weather of Australia.
Although the move to Australia seems random on the surface, it is motivated by Peter’s desire to get far away from reminders of the war. The war haunts Peter’s experience even of climate—a detail that testifies to how the memory of war permeates nearly all aspects of his life. Furthermore, in shaping the lives of the Szubanski family as a whole, war is shown to be influential even in the lives of those who didn’t experience it firsthand.
Themes
Apart from Australia, Peter considered moving other places, including South Africa; but a friend warned that Peter would feel compelled to fight with Black people against the Afrikaners if the family moved to South Africa. When the family left for Australia, Meg stayed in Liverpool; Magda can’t remember saying goodbye to her grandmother, and this breaks her heart.
Magda’s rebuke of herself for failing to remember is an early sign of her obsession with the possibilities and limitations of memory—in the way that memory connects her to her ancestors even through time and place, but also how it fails to bridge the separation in experience between them.
Themes
At the London airport on route to Australia, Peter heard that Mieczysław had died. Magda knows that Peter and his father had a falling out before they were separated forever, but she doesn’t know what they argued over. The family boarded their plane to Australia. Peter’s watch, which had been Mieczysław’s, stopped at exactly the time Mieczysław died.
Not only did the war separate Peter’s family, but it prevented them from finding the peace that family members seek with one another before death. In stalling relationships and leaving conflicts unresolved, war’s emotional ruptures augment the pain of the physical separations it creates.
Themes
On their way to Australia, Magda met a woman who warned the family not to mix with Australian natives or pick up Australian accents. On the plane, flight attendants served Magda Coca-Cola. While waiting for their connecting flight in New York City, the family walked around Manhattan for a day. Later, they saw the grand canyon from a plane. At a hotel one night, Peter refused to investigate a strange noise outside the door. Margaret got up to check and found a man holding a gun who promptly ran away. To this day, Margaret muses on Peter’s ambivalence.
Peter’s ambivalence suggests an absence of fear as well as the desire not to escalate the situation. As a former assassin, Peter is comfortable around guns. However, the war also taught Peter that emotions of any kind only put a person more at risk of capture and death. His lack of defense suggests strategy: he does not want to display agitation that would further endanger the family.
Themes
On December 23, 1965, the family arrived in Australia, stepping off the plane and into bewildering 105-degree heat. Harry Vincent, Peter’s new colleague, met the family at the airport to drive them to their hotel. The car door handles were burning hot. Inciting her mother’s scolding, Magda exclaimed in awe over Harry Vincent sweat-saturated back. At the hotel, the kids spent the day in the pool. When they moved into their company house, a constant screeching sound puzzled the family. Margaret asked a girl who lived next door about the sound and found out it was caused by cicadas.
Magda and her siblings marvel at the various sensations of Australia’s constant heat—the most notable difference between Australia and the European areas the Szubanskis are from. In this way, Australia is like an alien land in which the Szubanskis seek to erase—down to their very sensory experiences—the reminders of the war that mar their recent past.
Themes
Peter loved the blistering heat of Australia; he even mowed the lawn in 103-degree heat, his head wrapped in a towel; Margaret loved the smell of Eucalyptus. Magda, however, thought the brushland trees, unlike the oaks of England, looked like beggars in tattered rags; it took years for her to gather enough sensory experience of Australia that it became familiar.
Although Magda moves to Australia as a young girl, she never feels at home there—she merely gets used to it. In this way, Peter’s reality as a veteran exiled from home passes down to Magda in the form of the feeling of living in a strange place that is not one’s home.
Themes
A few years after the family moved to Australia, Magda found her mother crying: Meg had died. Never having seen Margaret cry, Magda laughs at her. When Margaret snaps, Magda runs into the backyard and sobs. A neighborhood boy whom Magda dislikes comes to annoy her but soon leaves. Years later, after Peter’s death when Magda and Margaret are discussing if an afterlife exists, Margaret says that she heard Meg had promised to send birds from “the other side.” However, when Meg died, two swallows that were usually outside left and never came back.
Margaret’s anecdote of the swallows outlines two possible “afterlives,” one from which the dead look after the living (by sending birds) and one in which the dead take more from life than they leave behind. Although she does not resolve it here, the question of the afterlife is important to Magda’s project of recovering and reckoning with her family’s past. If a person “takes the swallows” into the afterlife, it is all the more vital to plumb the depths of a person while they are alive.
Themes
