by Olga Chaplin
At last they were moved forward to the boarding plank, then were directed to male and female dormitories. Evdokia clung to the single valise, their only accessible luggage for the month-long sojourn. She remained mute as he reassured her there was little they needed on this equatorial voyage, that ship-deck living would improve their health. He laughed at his daughters’ excitement, nodding approval for them to follow Mykola to an enclosed deck. Evdokia waved Peter on, settling herself in her allocated bunk to converse with the other women, all strangers, all displaced persons from disparate camps in western Europe.
Peter found the higher deck, and gazed at the scene before him. Below him at quayside, officials, exasperated the docking time had passed, were shouting orders to the crew. Last orders were chaotically directed, the boarding plank removed as the ship’s horn blasted above all the other commotion. He felt the first lurch of freed ship as the mooring lines came away, a soft cheer from the crowd on deck acknowledging they were at last departing.
He could now look beyond the embarkation point, to the whole bay of Naples. Though it was late-January and the breeze was crisp, there was a gaiety, a casualness to the life of this busy vibrant city. Their stay had been prolonged, but not unhappy, and little Ola had finally thrived in the relative warmth of the Mediterranean climate. He sighed in relief, assured at last that their Naples stay had not been in vain: it had formed his decision to take this available ship to Australia, rather than risk Ola’s health. He had conceded that Australia, and especially Sydney, which he had nominated, was not unlike this Neapolitan city with its inviting climate. He was glad, now, that he had perused again, more carefully, the brochure earlier given him by an IRO official.
Now, as the ship pulled away from its dock and passengers celebrated in song, he watched as the Mediterranean water pushed him further and further from European soil. He could not cry: he had to stay strong, for himself, for his family. He looked again one last time towards the slowly receding buildings and hotels lining the shore near the docks, then blinked in disbelief. Someone had hung a Ukrainian flag over the balustrade of a great old building, its blue and gold colours lit up by the sun’s rays. He tried to control his emotions: he had kept them locked tight since that eventful day in the local Neapolitan church.
He looked to the heavens, to give him emotional strength. As if in answer to his unspoken prayer, high above him a white dove circled round and round and, catching the uplifting breeze, it was being transported upward and upward to the sky. His heart pounded: he knew he had this voyage to make across the seas. But try as he might, he could not hold his soul: it followed the winged dove, was transported north-east, to his homeland; paused for him; waited. And waited.
PART IV
Chapter 40
“Bonjorno! Bonjorno!” the Italian official’s incomprehensible message crackled again through the loudspeaker above, startling the men in their game. They paused, straining to decipher the foreign language. Anton, with his trump cards held ready in mid-air, looked up to the staff deck and frowned, sunlight piercing his eyes as it flashed between the ship’s flag and funnel, making him lose his concentration. Suddenly, he threw his cards at the deck table and lurched back, tripping himself.
“Ah! Otse tyt! Orders! Orders! They told us this would be different from the camps—ordering us about every day of our lives!”
Peter grinned and shook his head in mock reproach, and winked at Semmen and Mikhaelo as they cajoled their friend. “Anton,” he grasped the man’s shoulder in reassurance and retrieved the deckchair. “Come now, man! Why, they tell us we haven’t even yet reached the halfway point of our voyage!” Anton, eyes downcast and his face flushed, began collecting the scattered cards. He pushed back his thick, knotted hair that, after weeks of sea spray and burning sun, blew about like discarded bleached seaweed in the stiffening late afternoon breeze.
Peter controlled his mirth and gestured for peace. Anton’s almost comical appearance these days was incongruous with his inner turmoil. Peter felt concern for this youngest member of their group as they wiled away their days at card games on the ship’s narrow open deck. He watched closely, noting that Anton, usually so affable, appeared to be uncharacteristically edgy now, even somewhat distressed. Peter sighed. He understood Anton’s dilemma. Separated from his frightened young wife and infant, who remained in the safety of the ship’s cramped lounge area, Anton felt powerless and strangely alone on this small troopship carrier crammed with a thousand displaced persons and crew. Peter, too, felt the sense of entrapment that grew with each day on a voyage, never before taken, by sea. He had to remind himself it was but a short period of discomfort in a journey that promised a new future.
“Anton, good fellow,” he ventured, grasping his agitated friend. “Do us a service and check that officer’s newsboard! It might explain some of today’s commotion. At least it will be in a language we can all understand!” Anton nodded, relieved to be given a distracting task.
“And you know your Raya and baby Rosa are with Evdokia and our little girls today? I hear they join them each day now … Evdokia welcomes your wife’s company; she watches over Mykola and his friends as they amuse themselves nearby. You could call by the women’s lounge, see how they are faring!”
Anton grinned with relief, steadying himself at the deck’s rail as the ship dipped and lunged again in the deep swell. The men paused before beginning another round, each caught in his own private thoughts of their recent vivid memories of Naples where they had only weeks earlier celebrated and anticipated a happier future. Now that future was unfolding before them, and doubts were setting in, their fear of the unknown somehow more threatening in an ocean as vast as this.
“What is a man to do on such a ship?” Semmen shrugged his shoulders as he watched Anton disappear from view. “We are in darkened dormitories, separated from our families, with only this deck and little else but the card games to distract ourselves from the seasickness all around us!”
Mikhaelo nodded and leaned forward, cradled his head in his hands. His eyes skimmed the seemingly infinite horizon as emerald ocean met azure sky in the glare of the burning sun, and distracted himself as he watched Peter expertly cut and deal the cards. “You know, Petro, some of us are already talking of leaving the ship at Fremantle. Our wives and children cannot overcome their seasickness. My Maria queues each day now to see the ship’s doctor. He can do little for her … so today they have permitted her to remain in the dormitory with our little son.”
Peter and Semmen’s eyes met. They instinctively understood the import of this. They had all nominated Sydney as their destination. This decommissioned troopship had remained just long enough in Aden to re-fuel and re-supply. Once it reached Fremantle, there were no further ports of call before the ship’s short re-fuel in Melbourne, not even in an emergency, until it reached its Sydney dock. So much depended on the health of each family member, and from the outset Mikhaelo’s Maria had reacted adversely to the ship’s constant swaying.
Peter sensed the pensive mood. He glanced at the exposed cards on the deck table and counted his own winning hand. It could be a protracted game but he surreptitiously allowed his friends the advantage. “Ah, dyrak!” he cried, shrugging in seeming disappointment as they beamed, cheered by their unexpected luck.
“Time for some morsels, while we wait for our Anton!” He retrieved a small cloth bag from a crevice and laid out their daily fare of dried Italian bread crusts, onions, and small tin of sea salt. Their strong black tea, in metal mugs, diluted somewhat the pungency of the mix: their food of survival distilled from sailors’ accounts, that would counteract the generous but rich cafeteria meals, and the nausea that hit them almost without warning as the diesel fumes, acrid below-deck air, and seasickness, permeated through their windowless bunk dormitories in the ship’s bowel. Adjusting to nature’s elements of burning sun and stinging sea spray was testy enough to endure each day on this narrow outer deck, but it was far more preferable to the misery being exper
ienced daily below.
They ate slowly, savouring the tang and sting of onion and salt on dried flaky bread. Few passengers were enticed by such potions, and fewer still believed in their medicinal efficacy. Others still, like Ola, could not tolerate any raw onion, its effects leaving her buckled in pain. Peter sighed and felt his jaw stiffen. It had taken months to improve Ola’s health before embarking this ship in Naples. He prayed each day that his little family would not succumb to the ship’s illnesses. The easy, calmer part of the voyage was now behind them, the more treacherous ocean crossing was still ahead.
Anton rushed back, his eyes gleaming and his unruly locks causing further jesting. “Well! Can you believe! Those announcements!” He blushed as he remembered his earlier outburst. “We are to have a ‘Crossing the Equator’ ceremony tomorrow! We are all asked to participate! Do you know … a sort of ‘King Neptune’ is to officiate, and the ship’s captain will attend. They will give us certificates, and gifts, and the children are to have a special party!” He looked sheepishly at Peter. “Your Evdokia has also promised to accompany Raya and our baby Rosa!” Peter grinned and nodded, pleased that Anton was no longer so despairing at his wife’s morbid fear of the sea voyage.
He suddenly realised as he observed Anton that he, too, had been a similar age when he married his first love, Hanya. Without warning, tears smarted his eyes. He turned away and leaned against the cold steel rail, allowing the stinging sea spray to wash over him, as he searched for his pouch of tobacco. He forced himself to concentrate on his present surroundings, to remind himself of his and Evdokia’s good fortune. He could not allow himself, now, to think far back to those days of an earlier youthful married life. They were now in the middle of the Indian Ocean, somewhere between Africa and Asia, forging south-east towards another strange new continent at the opposite end of the globe from whence they came. In the vastness of the unfathomable ocean about them, and with no landmarks in sight these past days, there seemed to be a sense of unreality as daily he watched, mystified, as the deep emerald water changed to a liquid ebony with the disappearing sun.
He re-lit his rolled cigarette and licked at its bitter brown paper wrapping, all that remained in the ship’s cantina, and smiled as he remembered Evdokia’s triumph at her purchase of two small rugs from traders in the Suez Canal, in exchange for his cigarette carton that had been the captain’s gift upon embarkation. He leaned on the ship’s rail and pondered the events of these past weeks. The laden Castelbianco had an atmosphere of joviality as it left Naples, protected in the safety of the Mediterranean, taking on an almost carnival atmosphere during its slow passage through the Suez Canal, where traders from the exotic continent manoeuvred their bobbing boats and bargained trinkets and rugs with excited passengers on deck. Then their ship to freedom berthed at Aden, their last European port, for re-fuelling and being laden with crates of supplies. And now, as if in tune with the stiffening winds, after the earlier calm waters, the ship had cranked up its knots and forged ahead, determined to make up lost time.
The deck was now quiet, conviviality gone. His friends had packed away their chairs, left him to his reverie. Already the night was enfolding about him. He looked up in wonder, at a Higher Being performing its nightly alchemy magic. With each passing minute, the stars seemed to reach lower and lower towards the ship, as the inky sky darkened, soon to merge with the sea. He felt, in those moments, as if he could reach out and touch them, to catch their perennial spell, but resisted. He could just make out the large black-painted ′V′ on the ship’s funnel and marvelled at the ship’s new owner, Alexandre Vlasov who, it was rumoured, had also been a displaced person, somewhere in Europe. He shook his head in wonder. It took enterprise and courage, at war’s end, to so quickly gather such decommissioned troopships and place them at the behest of the International Relief Organisation, which was desperate for seaworthy vessels to transport displaced persons to all the continents of the globe. It also took courage, and generosity of heart, even if cased in pragmatism, for an Australian government and its people to open their doors to these strangers from a devastated continent.
Mykola’s blonde head was just visible in the ship’s muted light as he clung to the now wet rail. “Tato, Tato! Mama is already in the cafeteria queue!” Peter smiled, pleased that Mykola’s appetite had not waned on this voyage. He paused to look a last time at the ocean, which was now a murky black, with only slivers of refracted light streaking out a dubious path. Like a great sea creature, their black-hulled Castelbianco was now racing to join all those other great natural monsters of the antipodean oceans. He shivered as he made his way from the biting wind. He sensed that the next day’s equatorial celebrations, announced in admittedly intrusive spurts via a fractured public address system by well-meaning crew, would be a welcome distraction, and timely. Beyond that, there was no knowing how each passenger, each family, would fare for the remainder of their voyage.
Chapter 41
A senior ship’s officer checked Mikhaelo’s documents and stamped them, then gestured him to the small group queuing at the gangway. Peter, standing nearby and distracted as he watched a flock of large white seabirds circling high above the bay, heard his name.
“Petro!” Mikhaelo hugged him, his natural reserve dissipating. “Petro … all these years, we have been like brothers … the camp … Naples … and now to leave like this …” He held back a sob as his Maria and little son joined him to farewell Peter and Evdokia. He leaned closer. “What can I do, Petro?” he whispered. “It is too risky … Even the ship’s doctor agreed we must disembark here … for them to recover.”
Peter’s chest tightened with emotion, the sun’s bursting rays and chatter of friendly workers dock-side giving little comfort at that moment. But he smiled and tried to reassure this gentle man. “Ah, Mikhaelo, my dear friend … we will meet again, one day … soon, God willing.” He lifted Ola to Mikhaelo, watched as godfather and goddaughter hugged their farewell. His lips quivered, bravado shielding his doubts. Their sea voyage had brought them to this port of Fremantle, already so far from Naples, from a Europe he could understand, yet still there were several more weeks of the voyage before them. His heart felt heavy as he thought of their past life and contemplated their future. He would be forever grateful for this passage to a safe country that was to become their home, but only fully realised now what a great distance, great expanse of ocean, separated them from their European heritage.
“Come now, Dyna … don’t cry!” He linked his arm through hers and waved as Mikhaelo and Maria stepped off the gangway onto their Western Australian soil. He sighed as he watched Ola as she played nearby with the other children, her hair white and curly like the foam tossed by the waves, her face no longer pale in the fierce sunlight. Yet already she was thinner, less steady than she had been at their Naples embarkation.
“Ha, Petro! There you are!” Semmen beamed as he stepped forward with an acquaintance from their dormitory. “We have such luck, here, with our friend Fedor! When he’s bored with playing his instrument,” he waved jokingly at the newcomer’s hand accordion, “he wants to make up our number at the cards!” He turned to Fedor, spurred him to play a few chords. “Kalika, Kalika, Kalika moya!” Semmen sang to the tune. Peter grinned and patted his shoulder. He, too, was a brother in life in the camp. Each understood the other’s heavy heart at Mikhaelo’s departure. Their jesting with their new partner at the card game, and distraction with the accordion, were but a camouflage for the uncertainties that befell them each new day.
He leaned at the deck rail, observing the spacious bushy surroundings of this busy western port; watched with interest as muscular wharf workers, arms browned in the burning southern sun, loaded boxes of foodstuffs and supplies onto wooden platforms that were swung dangerously from wharf to ship’s hold. The ship’s replenishments, activities, were at last completed, the cranes and gangway removed. The funnel, with its distinctive ′V′ glistening in the heat of the bay, blasted a final signal.
&n
bsp; A sharp wind farewelled the Castelbianco as it churned its way westward out of the docks, as if intent on following the lustrous setting sun; then, like a magnet drawn to an inexplicable compass point, it made its surreptitious way southwards, to yet another zone of the antipodes.
* * *
A lone wolf howled, low, from far away, signalled its territorial dominance in the black of night. Peter stirred, felt for the straw that had been his makeshift bed in his parents’ Siberian camp hovel, blinking at sleep as he tried to locate their snow-covered window. The howl became a wrenching sob, unlike any he had previously heard. He raised himself on an elbow as he took stock of his surroundings. His Yosep and Palasha receded in the dream, the lone wolf no longer audible, the snow-trapped window but an illusory memory in the windowless dormitory.
He felt his way between the bunks, gripping the timber rail of each upper bunk to steady himself as the ship swayed and lurched with each pounding swell. The sobs, more muffled now, were emanating from a far corner of this large dormitory in which a hundred men nightly cohabited.
“Fedor,” he whispered. “What is it?” He touched his friend’s shoulder. “What is it, my friend? What’s distressing you so?”
Fedor turned to him, his tormented face protected in the dark, his tears brushing Peter’s face. He was inconsolable: gasping, his shoulders heaving. Peter feared for him as he grasped his shoulders. “Come, Fedor, what has happened here? You must tell me, man.”
“Vera and I …” he groaned as he tried to control himself. “I have just returned … from the hospital bay … Vera and I … O God!” He broke down again. “We didn’t know … no-one could save our Galina. O God!” Still sobbing, he clung to him. Peter could feel the trickle of tears through his night shirt, felt the prickling sensation of tension and adrenalin as he tried to comfort Fedor.