Jewels and Ashes (4 page)

The birch tree is a streak of silver flashing in and out of the journey: slender saplings maturing into slim, elegant sentinels, standing mile upon mile, reappearing the length of the empire, sometimes alone, sometimes in forests, reflecting shafts of sunlight back at us as we stand, hour upon hour, our faces peering from the carriages, alert with curiosity and mesmerised by the rhythm of the train conveying us headlong in our dash across Siberia.

The birch. The beryose. The beryoskele. It features often in mother's repertoire of Yiddish songs. She sits in front of a heater, enduring in her old age yet another Melbourne winter. Where she once lived the winters were far more severe. Here it is cold enough, nevertheless, and she bends over towards the glowing bars of a radiator and hums softly to herself. Melodies rise like wisps of smoke from a smouldering fire. The kitchen in which she sits is a jumble of chipped crockery, fading table-cloths, cracked and worn linoleum; all of which she is reluctant to replace. She feels more at home surrounded by that which is redolent of another time and place. As mother hums, the table, the stove, the refrigerator, the cupboard, and the floor all recede, and the room is suffused with evening light. The walls give way and open out onto a vast expanse of land, a continent far distant, an empire of white beryoskelech.

Softly, softly, swaying her curly green hair,

My white beryoskele prays on and on;

Every single leaf of hers murmurs a quiet prayer:

Please, little beryoskele, also pray for me.

I came here alone, from distant parts.

Alien is the God from here and alien is his speech;

He cannot see my sadness nor understand my prayer:

Please, little beryoskele, also pray for me.

From the distant west a gentle breeze has come,

And tells the tiny leaves legends without end;

Something deep within my heart begins to yearn and pray:

Please, little beryoskele, also pray for me.

A kingdom of white birches, swaying and murmuring: quiet witnesses weaving in and out of legends set within a far distant land called Siberia. In Yiddish it was called ‘Sibir'. The word implied dark nights when ancestors were dragged out of bed and accused of political agitation against the Czar. Sibir meant frozen fatigued prisoners being taken to barren snow-covered wastes, thousands of kilometres east, in exile from family and friends. Sibir was a land of isolated communities with inmates doing infinite time on the edge of the horizon; a territory so raw and threatening in its vastness, yet so familiar, embedded in childhood melodies, and so close now that I feel I can lean over and reach into the cottages that nestle against the railway embankments.

Tales of Sibir were first told on Sunday afternoons when we gathered in the rooms of the Kadimah Cultural Institute, a two-storey building which stood opposite the Melbourne cemetery. We were the children of migrants and refugees, many of whom had waited for years in displaced persons' camps in various parts of Europe. Within the shadows of their recent bereavement they had sought asylum in a New World. ‘Why did you choose Australia?', we asked. ‘I looked at a map of the world and chose a place as far as possible from Sibir', one of them had replied.

In the New World our elders had resurrected fragments of the Old: Yiddish and Hebrew schools, synagogues and yeshivas, pre-war style communal organisations and institutes, where they spun tales of a past they could never forget. On those Sunday afternoons Sibir was recreated as a luminous dream of transparent white, over which sleds drawn by dogs had conveyed them to prisons of ice.

Beinish Michelevitz was among the many thousands exiled to Sibir. He returned to Poland where, in later years, he founded a children's socialist movement called Skif. Both my mother and father joined Skif's parent bodies, the Tsukunft and Bund. This is how they had met and become imbued with youthful visions of transforming the world.

Their vision was shattered by a catastrophe our communal elders called the Annihilation; but stories survived, countless tales of partisans and revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands, engaged in a fiery struggle for redemption and deliverance. The stories were transformed into legends forever associated with Sunday afternoons opposite the cemetery; and the tale that made the most indelible impact was of Beinish Michelevitz who, when transported to Sibir, had his hair turn from the black brilliance of youth into the white of a sage after just one night of fright. Hair can suddenly turn white in rimes of great fear, we were told. I marvelled at this incident and imagined it with clarity: white hair upon white ice upon the endless wastes of an ominous place called Sibir.

Yet the landscape which moves beyond dawn into a morning sun is a flying tapestry of radiant forests and fields where, seated upright in a saddle, a boy races a horse at full gallop as he swoops down upon a herd of cattle. A woman in a scarlet pullover, gold kerchief, and floral-patterned skirt picks wild flowers in a meadow between wooded mountains. There are fields of mauves, pastel blues, pale pinks, and soft yellows. Siberian summer: green upon green, multiple shades and layers of green bursting with fertility. Children play in Sibir, within forest clearings and on unpaved village streets. A man and boy, fishing rods slung over their shoulders, wade across a meandering stream as day begins to fade. A bloated crimson sun sets fire to the rails along which our train curves; the fires die back into speeding tracks blazing silver. Cottages of Siberian villages sink into darkness. Smoke curls from their chimneys into a chill evening sky; and I imagine myself inside, seated snug by my babushka, listening to tales of a Siberia I had never thought could be so beautiful.

What was it they were trying to convey, our elders, when they told us their stories? ‘Kadimah' means ‘future'; yet they talked endlessly about the past, sometimes lovingly, sometimes with great venom. Their stories were like the Siberian night sky as it appears now above the train, streaking starlight between spaces of darkness; and this is where their tales petered out, into an infinite darkness they called the Annihilation. They left a legacy of fragments, a jumble of jewels and ashes, and forests of severed family trees which their children now explore and try somehow to restore.

Not long after we had moved clear of the Sino-Soviet border, our train had pulled into a station where a peasant couple boarded with their teenage daughter. They escorted her to our cabin, to the seat she had been assigned, and left her, reluctantly it seemed, among strangers.

For two days she remained silent, curled up in a blanket opposite me, curious, timid, withdrawn and wrapped in a private cocoon, her shyness slowly melting. She finally accepted the food we offered to share. In return we received homemade sweet bread, yoghurt, and crisp waffles baked, I imagined, in a village of far-eastern Siberia.

On the fourth day we discover a means of conversing. We point to words in a Russian-English dictionary and slowly piece together sentences. Her name is Dorima. She is a Baryat, from a tribe in the Taiga forests that sprawl over huge areas of Siberia. Her features are Asiatic; eyes elongated, complexion dark. Her forefathers hunted and foraged, and their skins thickened into cracked leather against intense summer heat and sub-zero winters. They live now in a farming co-operative, of which her father is secretary. She had never ventured beyond her province until this journey to Moscow, where she will stay with an aunt.

We sit on opposite bunks, silent for many hours against the hypnotic swaying of the train, and seem to share a deepening understanding. We are both locked into dreamscapes by which we measure the scenes that unfold outside, shaping them according to quite different imaginings, while sharing the same relentless momentum. For Dorima, Siberia is the intimate canopy of childhood, the pungent freshness of the Taiga, and forest clearings where her father ploughs and plants. It is the world beyond Siberia that appears alien, somewhat threatening but alluring, and perhaps more accessible now, through the word-by-word descriptions we have eked out of a dictionary.

The landscape loses its raw and untamed quality as we move westwards. On the fifth day we see showers of red particles, in a storm which conveys the acrid taste of acidic rain. Layers of dust settle in our compartments. Passengers rush to close windows. Through the haze we see that we are approaching an industrial city. Massive complexes of factories and plants pump waste into the skies; gigantic motors hum and vibrate, and indicate that we are on the outskirts of Novosibirsk. Barges ferry heavy equipment across a river which flows into the city centre. A station bookshop sells manuals on mechanics and mathematics. The world is becoming functional, framed by girders and cranes: Siberian soil sealed in concrete and bitumen.

We are on the threshold of the West, the indefinite border between Asiatic and European. Mid afternoon, Dorima lies on the lower bunk asleep, a copy of
Izvestia
abandoned across her upper body, her horizontally striped red-and-white blouse peeping over the edges of the newspaper while we twist into the Ural mountains, our Siberian dream fading.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CARRIAGES WHICH HAVE CONVEYED US thousands of kilometres, day and night for a week, stand dormant at Jaraslavl station in Moscow. Clocks on stations along the Trans-Siberian line are set according to Moscow time; so that, in the far east during summer, day has barely faded by midnight. The empire beats according to the dictates of the centre; all roads lead eventually to the palaces of the Red Square.

The momentum of the train resonates as an echo which gives way to an inner silence. Within that silence I transfer my luggage, by taxi, through the streets of Moscow. At first glance the city appears spacious, cosmopolitan, with wide avenues and grand mansions that hint at bygone imperial splendour. Yet within an instant the city appears closed, empty, a lifeless museum in which set-pieces parade like marionettes. Moscow on a mild summer day, 1986; and, as if awakening from a trance, I realise that I am viewing the city through the same fluctuating inner lens I have focussed on almost every scene that has unfolded since I set out on this journey.

Uncle Zachariah, the first child of Bishke Zabludowski and Sheine Liberman, was born in 1892, in the city of Bialystok. My father was still a child confined to cheders and Talmud Torahs, immersed in Hebraic scriptures and sacred texts, when Zachariah was already a young man, drifting among the people of the streets, increasingly removed from the protective world of religious orthodoxy.

Father idolised his eldest brother. He loomed large, and exuded the scent of side streets and forbidden fruit. Father, who is quite short, lifts up his arms to indicate how tall and robust Zachariah had been. His descriptions remind me of a time during childhood when I thought father was so enormous he could not fit into the bathtub properly, and had to sit awkwardly, his arms drooping over the sides.

Now the son towers over the father as he tells me that, on Saturday afternoons, Zachariah would visit an aunt and uncle who lived near the Bialystok fish market. Butchers by trade, on the day of rest they would lounge on the verandah, gossiping and drinking while a constant stream of visitors dropped by — hawkers, market dealers, factory hands, wagon drivers, innkeepers, and wide-eyed idealists who spoke of budding conspiracies against the Czar. The abortive revolution of 1905 had been and gone. They were lying low, those who had supported it, waiting for the next push, always seeking recruits to bolster their ranks. Most of the visitors, however, preferred a game of cards, an afternoon in the taverns, or a long snooze in hammocks that were slung over the verandah, rather than clandestine activity on their one day of relief from work.

This is how father depicts it. But beware! He retains vestiges of the Romantic. He reconstructs the past as a series of grand gestures and sweeping movements, broken occasionally by a poetic detail — such as an eccentric remembrance of Zachariah coming home from the streets and lifting him up in the air in a sudden exuberant burst of energy, hurling and catching him mid-flight and then, just as abruptly, leaving him, an irrelevant child.

In the years immediately before the First World War, Zachariah became involved in Yiddish theatre. At first he worked as an extra in the productions of provincial troupes on tour in Bialystok. He graduated to the grand position of prompter, his name featuring on programmes that father claims had been in his possession until recently, when he lent them to a prominent actor in the Melbourne Yiddish theatre. Unfortunately, he misplaced these rare jewels, as father calls the various artefacts he brought with him from the Old World. Actually, the actor went mad, according to father, and lost both his mind and his possessions. This is how it is when we talk about Bialystok. Father sidetracks, goes on many detours, and has to be coaxed back on course to describe how Zachariah would stand beneath the stage of the renowned Palace Theatre in a halo of footlights that poked from behind a trapdoor, to steer the actors above him through memory losses. He always seemed to be carrying a script in his hands, and became known as someone who could be relied upon in moments of doubt.

In 1914, when the first bombs rained down upon Bialystok, Zachariah clambered onto the roof of the building in which the Zabludowski family lived. He stood on the tiles and watched excitedly as the city exploded around him. Sheine Liberman poked her head out of a garret window. ‘Come down, you lunatic', she screamed. Inside, father marvelled yet again at the reckless abandon with which his brother approached life. Zachariah was enjoying himself, apparently, from his first-class vantage point, and retreated just as fragments of shrapnel landed where he had been standing moments earlier.

Within a year the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm occupied Bialystok. Zachariah's love of the streets became a more perilous affair: on several occasions he was among those rounded up by the occupying armies to be forced into work gangs. Eventually he obtained regular work, with a wage of sorts, as a labourer on road and railway construction projects controlled by the occupiers. And it was on these building sites that Zachariah was drawn, along with many others, to the whispers he had heard on an uncle's verandah in pre-war times. He listened now with more attention and interest, for it seemed their time had come.