by Arnold Zable
From the outside, the house was like the others in the village, a variation of brightly painted weatherboard, but inside, in sharp contrast to the homes I had entered in nearby towns and hamlets, the floorboards were polished and there were books scattered over the tables, the shelves and sofas and stacked upon the mantelpiece: volumes in Polish and French, Russian, English and German. Katrina spent her days reading between her household duties. Her interests ranged from history and philosophy to literary journals and novels.
She spoke quickly, as if anxious to impress on me her sense of taste, and her passions. There was urgency in her short, hurried steps and her emphatic hand gestures. At her insistence Stefan showed me his stamp collection. We sat side by side on a sofa as Stefan navigated the pages of his albums. He travelled from country to country with the ease of a mariner who had many times undertaken the journey.
When we were done, we leaned over an atlas and I traced the circuitous route I had taken from Melbourne, via Beijing, across Siberia, the length of the Soviet Empire and, after a change of trains in Moscow, southwest to Warsaw, then back east to the borderland towns and villages of my ancestors. And finally, following a chance encounter in the city of Bialystok, to this hamlet, and the timber house where Stefan and I sat over maps like plotting conspirators.
Katrina unlocked a drawer and took out a pile of letters. The envelopes bore stamps from Britain, France and West Germany. In time she would allow Stefan to steam them off for his collection. They were treasured possessions, letters from friends abroad, her lifeline to what she imagined was a world of refinement and freedom. Mother and son were partners in their infatuation with other places.
As the afternoon progressed they became expectant. Nervous. They glanced at each other, towards the door and at their watches. Katrina’s husband, Tomas, was due home at any moment. He might arrive drunk, or in a dark mood. With luck he would be sober. Though he was not yet in sight Katrina and Stefan spoke of him in a near whisper.
At the sound of a vehicle pulling up Stefan announced his father’s arrival. Through the window could be seen a battered truck. The tyres were muddy and the windscreen was splattered with the remains of insects. On the tray lay two ladders, a chainsaw and sawn logs and branches.
A tall, broad-shouldered man, Tomas stooped low beneath the lintel. He had returned from an overnight sojourn in the Bialowieza Forest, a vast nature reserve straddling the eastern border. His face and arms were sun-beaten. His body was muscular and heavy, and his clothes smelt of damp and resin. He addressed his wife as ‘mother’ and shook my hands in greeting. He took a bottle of champagne from the drinks cabinet and handed it to me with childish pleasure. He was the man of the house, the host, and this was French champagne, he proudly indicated, pointing to the label.
Katrina and Stefan stood to the side as he poured the champagne into crystal glasses. Without a word Tomas picked up a carved silver music box from the mantelpiece. He handled it gently, carefully placing it down on the table. It was a present he had bought for his wife when he was a guest worker in Switzerland.
He glanced nervously at Katrina as he set it in motion, but she looked away. The song, the theme from the film Love Story, her contemptuous expression indicated, was beneath her. It was her measure of the man, his lack of refinement and his cheap sentimentality. With each glance from her husband Katrina withdrew further. In his presence she seemed much smaller, but still defiant.
Tomas put his hand to his forehead. He was floundering. The polished floorboards were at sharp odds with his heavy work boots. He looked at the books and pamphlets as if he did not recognise his surroundings. With great effort he tried to regain the awkward grin he had worn when he entered.
I had unwittingly stepped into a domestic drama. I could not know the details or nuances. I had no idea of the history, of what had once brought husband and wife together and the chain of events that had drawn them apart. Perhaps there had been outbursts of rage, bouts of violence, chronic drunkenness, or misunderstandings that had compounded into an irretrievable breakdown. All I had was what I sensed before me in that cottage in an isolated village in the shadows of nightfall.
Husband and wife were locked from each other. At least, this is how I saw it. They had devised separate exits for their torment, he through drink and solitary sojourns in the forests, she through dreams of starting anew in the West. Theirs was just one tiny drama in the vast expanses of the Soviet empire and its satellite nations. They were trapped in a moment of history, enclosed behind the Iron Curtain.
He was of the forest and silences, night fires and shadows, conifers and the aroma of resin. He yearned for romance, she for salons and theatres, elevated conversation, the classical and the elegant. She longed for nocturnes and concertos, he for a simple love song. And I was just passing through.
After dinner Tomas slept on a sofa while Stefan sat at a table studying. The shutters were closed; the sunflowers drooped. The cat lay asleep at Katrina’s feet while she sat on a couch, reading. The house was silent, save for the ticking of a grandfather clock and its hourly tolling. It stood in a corner beside a precarious tower of books, a breath away from toppling.
Assuring me that Stefan was beyond rousing, Katrina and Stefan ushered me out of the house for a walk through the village. The domes of the church were silhouetted against the night sky. Many houses were dark, their inhabitants retired for the night. On the roadside stood a shrine to the Madonna, and at the base lay a wilted posy of flowers. Beyond the street, the village gave way to darkness.
Our footsteps triggered a chorus of barks and howls. Katrina and Stefan paid no attention. They walked without looking about them. Their minds were firmly on their purpose, and Katrina was imploring, ‘Can you help us? Please, can you arrange for us a visa? If we do not get out soon, our lives will be wasted. We need a sponsor, permits. Help us leave this black hole. We are choking.’
Hours later I lay awake on the sofa bed. Katrina, Stefan and Tomas were sleeping. In the morning I would continue my journey, and tomorrow night I would be elsewhere. I was travelling alone, and this is how I preferred it. I was free to come as I pleased, to enter into other people’s lives, and move on when it suited me. And free to rise now from my bed at the sound of hooves and the creaking of wheels over the roadway.
I pushed open the shutters. A horse-drawn cart, piled high with bales of hay was passing. The farmer was leading the horse, walking slowly before it. I watched the cart until it vanished, then glanced back at Tomas who lay asleep, his legs curled in a foetal position to fit the sofa.
Yes, I was just passing through. Or was I? This journey was different from those I had previously undertaken. I was deep in my ancestral territory, and had been for more than six weeks now. On nights like this my forebears had slept in the settlements of these borderlands, perhaps in this very village. Yet it had ended badly. My perception was affected by what I knew, coloured a shade darker. A generation had been wiped out, and those few who remained had emigrated. I glanced at the table. The music box glinted: a brittle presence in the near darkness.
When I awoke, Tomas was fully dressed and waiting. I had planned to move on by train, but he insisted on taking me with him. I was his guest. Why go by train if he could give me a lift, he argued. The truck was ready, the sandwiches packed. Besides, the Bialowieza Forest, my intended destination, was his workplace. To refuse would be a slight upon his hospitality.
Katrina had yet to put on her makeup. She appeared older, deflated. The slight greying in the temples was now visible. Instead of high heels, she was wearing slippers. She was long up, and had prepared breakfast. The urgency of the previous night had evaporated.
Mother and son were silent. Their mood had shifted in tandem to resignation and sullen defiance. They saw me to the door, shook my hand, and stood on the doorstep, listlessly. They barely waved as Tomas backed onto the roadway. They knew as well as I did that I would not help them.
Tomas drove to the end of the street and sto
pped in front of a wooden cottage. It was smaller than the one we had just left, a doll’s house. The dark green paint on the wood shutters was flaking. An old woman seated at a table could be seen through the window.
She was by the door to greet us by the time we arrived, a short and stout woman, white hair tied back in a simple bun. Tomas bent over to kiss her on the forehead. She insisted on serving breakfast despite my protests. Her face was fixed with the weary smile of those who have fulfilled life’s tasks and are quietly waiting. She walked slowly about the kitchen and spoke in a childish whisper.
On the table by the window were two potted geraniums and a biscuit tin overflowing with sewing needles, tape measures and reels of cotton. Beside the tin lay the dress she had been mending. Just one book was visible, the Bible. It sat on the mantelpiece beside a plaster statuette of Jesus on the cross, trapped in his agony. On the wall hung a framed poster of the Madonna, hand on heart, eyelids lowered.
The house was considerably smaller than Tomas’s, the carpets threadbare. Embroidered pillows lay scattered over the aged sofas and armchairs. The furniture, the wood stove, the cushions and tablecloth brought to mind ageing comfort. The one object the two houses had in common was the grandfather clock. Here it stood against the living-room wall. The clock was at home here, as was Tomas. Though few words passed between them, there was an intimacy between mother and son that was absent between wife and husband.
By the time we returned to the truck, Tomas’s mother was back at her post by the table, gazing out blankly. She was a still life, beyond haste, beyond hoping. I could only guess at what she had endured and witnessed in her life. As we pulled away, her pale face dissolved to an apparition. The streets receded. The onion domes glinted in the sunlight. Then they too were gone, obscured in dust as we drove on a dirt road that cut back to the highway. Behind us, lost in silence, stood the village of the forgotten.
Tomas held the steering wheel with one hand, and with the other rummaged in the glove box in search of a bottle opener. He handed it to me and pointed to the beer bottles on the back seat. I opened one and passed it over. He gulped it down and, when he was done, began humming the theme from Love Story.
We passed a caved-in farmhouse and, several kilometres further on, another. When neglected houses collapse, the chimney is the last to go. It remains long after the main structure is gone, like the teeth of long-decayed corpses. We passed a barn bulging with fodder. Strands poked through cracks and spilt through the open doorway. The landscape was familiar, yet alien.
Late morning we arrived at the outskirts of the Bialowieza Forest and, soon after, we veered off the highway onto an overgrown track. Tomas stopped in a clearing. Armed with a chainsaw, he disappeared and returned every ten minutes with sawn logs and branches. He firmly refused my offers of help. This was his domain, his purchase on pride and competence.
After one last foray, he brought back a hessian sack filled with mushrooms and set about building a fire. Despite his size, Tomas appeared at ease, unencumbered. The heavy boots and the lumbering gait, which had appeared so ungainly the previous day, now had about them a touch of lightness. As the fire died down he placed a blackened pot over the embers. He cut the stalks off as he waited for the water to boil, and then threw in the mushrooms.
He worked methodically. When the mushrooms were done, he served them with oil and vinegar on tin plates. He unwrapped the sandwiches and placed them beside the mushrooms. We ate in silence. Language was a barrier, except for the smattering of German that Tomas had acquired as a guest worker. Besides, by nature he was not talkative. It didn’t matter. He had prepared and served food with care and attention. His gesture spoke volumes.
If only Stefan and Katrina could see him at his work, I couldn’t help thinking. If only they could appreciate his attention to detail, and his knowledge of the borderlands. And the pride he took in being of service. Or perhaps they had seen it often enough, and this too now repelled them.
I recalled Tomas as I had seen him the previous night, curled up within himself like an infant, and my first sight of him, stooping beneath the lintel, reduced in stature despite his height and physical vigour, his helplessness in the presence of his wife and son, and the aching distance between them. In stark contrast, in the forest he was fully alive, fully present.
Mid-afternoon Tomas dropped me off at a lodge by the forest. He insisted on carrying my backpack into the foyer. I accompanied him back outside. He stood by the truck, unsteady on his feet, and grasped my right hand. He would not let go of it.
At some point in the previous hour, he had crossed a threshold. The balance between sobriety and inebriation had tilted. The ease and competence I had seen in the forest was gone. His bloodshot eyes veered between powerlessness and menace. They drew me in and held me. It was writ large in those bloody rivulets: the longing for communion, and the hint of a rage that could burst into fury. Or so I imagined.
In the hours we had driven on the road, we had barely exchanged a word. Yet I knew. I knew more than enough, and I felt for him. And I was relieved when he let go of my hand and climbed back into the cabin.
The sun was low, all but obscured by the foliage. I looked downwards as I walked, late afternoon, in the forest. Frogs hid in the undergrowth. Flies lay ensnared on spiderwebs, fallen oaks were entangled in greenery. The forest floor was moist, layered with leaves and pine needles, swarming with small life: fungi, mosses, herbs and mushrooms, vines snaking up massive trunks, living and dead matter embracing. All was still apart from a single bird call and the intermittent shriek of insects.
A sudden radiance of late afternoon sun flared in a clearing. Yet even here, as in many nearby places, there were markers of mass graves, sites of massacre, where Nazi battalions had hunted down and murdered partisans and civilians. I was struck by the irony: so much sun-dappled beauty, yet so much slaughter. There was no way out, nowhere to avoid it.
Years later I would come to know the numbers. Here in the borderlands between 1933 and 1945 some fourteen million unarmed people were murdered. They were starved, shot or gassed. Most were women and children, and the aged. These figures do not include the millions of armed soldiers killed in the same area in frontline combat.
‘Bloodlands’, the historian Timothy Snyder calls the area ranging from central Poland to western Russia, from the Black Sea to the Baltic, from the Ukraine through Belarus to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. And even here, in these last remains of primeval forest that once spread across the plains of Europe.
At this moment I stood at the geographical epicentre. Even though I did not know the figures then, I was overcome by the sheer magnitude of what had transpired here. So many deaths, so much wanton murder.
I returned to the lodge and lay back on the bed exhausted. Through my window I could make out conifers swaying. The exposed roof beams and the timber panelling were giving way to darkness. The events of recent days weighed heavily. The images of the months of travel and what I had come upon in the past hour were a confusing jumble: the tangled undergrowth, the markers of mass graves, the posies of flowers. The confusion amplified, somehow, by Tomas’s bloodshot eyes, Stefan’s pale complexion, Katrina’s desperation. And a silver music box, like a wounded bird, playing a song of irretrievable love and shattered promises.
Capriccio
The road to Puchalski’s cottage runs east through the borderlands, and Andrei is laughing, for the smooth curving of the asphalt beneath his Skoda, the midday sun that pierces the gaps in the passing forest, for the pure joy of it. An amber necklace glints against his black jumper. He drapes one arm around Halinka’s shoulders and, with the other, he grips the steering wheel. Marek and I are in the back seat, Andrei’s violin between us. Golden autumn, the Poles call it, season of mellow mists and fruitfulness as Keats would have it, though we will have to wait until nightfall for the mists.
Andrei is not a man who waits. There is something he wishes to show us. He skids the car to a stop. We follow him on the path
that cuts into the forest. A scattering of cones lies on the pathway. An anthill teems with busy workers. We stop to pick blueberries as Andrei moves ahead to a pine tree.
‘The pine is the violinist’s tree,’ he says. Andrei jabs his finger at the crimson resin bleeding from the trunk. ‘It provides the rosin for the bow. It adds friction to the hair. Without rosin there is no sound when the bow is applied to the strings.’
Andrei takes off his necklace and points out the individual beads. Embedded within each bead are dark spots, spidery veins. ‘They are insects, slivers of bark, fragments of leaves,’ he says, ‘ancient remnants trapped in the past like embalmed mummies.’
‘Andrei! You are running ahead of yourself,’ says Marek, a forest ranger and biologist. ‘Before we can talk of amber and what lies trapped within it, we need to understand that the resins are toxic hydrocarbon secretions that protect the tree from herbivores. It takes millennia for them to harden into the fossilised resins that we call amber.’
‘A few thousand years, give or take, what does it matter,’ says Andrei. He is restless, anxious to be on the move. ‘Amber traps the past, that is the point. It is a reflection of the Polish temperament,’ he laughs.
‘Like the amber, we too hold onto the past. Some nations look forward, others live in the moment, but our gaze is turned backward. We are trapped by what has taken place, burdened by the presence of the empires that flank us—Germany to the west, the Soviets to the east. We see ourselves as victims squeezed between predators, a nation of underdogs. I wear the amber necklace because it reminds me to live for the day, lest this be my maudlin fate.’
On our return to the Skoda Andrei wraps his arms round Halinka’s waist. He runs his hands over her dress, gently pushes up the hem and brushes his fingers over her thighs. She leans into him and encircles her arms around his shoulders with the ease of a lover. They embrace on the verge in full view of the passing traffic.