by Arnold Zable
‘I was obsessed with food. When I fell asleep, I dreamt of my mother’s choient and roasts, Wolfke's brisket and schnitzels, Vilna's bakeries and cafes. All the wise sayings of the philosophers were reduced to just one thought: food. We searched every corner, every obscure hole, for just one more crumb.
‘We were entitled to a ration of bread, perhaps six hundred grams, that is, if you fulfilled your work quota for the day. Otherwise an amount was deducted. The bread was lousy and the bread cutters were criminals. Sometimes they would cut off a bit less so they could keep more for themselves.
‘The common criminals were treated better than the political prisoners. In the gulag, political prisoners were on the lowest rung. There was a rigid class system in the classless society! On the top rung were the nachalniks, the camp commanders and party bosses. Then came the guards and soldiers who kept their eyes on our every move; and in the stinking barracks the criminals were the true bosses, while we were the slaves.
‘The criminals controlled the kitchens. They were well-fed. They bribed the guards who let them through the barbed-wire fences into the women's camp. They fell upon the women like wild beasts. After all, they were full of energy and zest. But the rest of us had no interest in sex. When you are hungry, food is more erotic than sex. The memory of a Vilna Sabbath stew was far more enticing than the most desirable of women.
‘In our spare time we sat on our bunks and watched the criminals play cards. Mostly they did play for other people's boots or overcoats. The loser would be obliged to attack one of the political prisoners, grab his spoils and give them to the winner. On one occasion they even played for their fingers. The loser stood up, took an axe, and chopped off a finger. I did see it myself.
‘This is what happens to you when you are cut off from the rest of the world. You become deranged. And we were cut off, completely. We were surrounded by barbed wire. Every hundred metres or so there stood a guard tower. If you tried to escape you were shot. And if you got away, where was there to run? The nearest railway line was five hundred kilometres away. The only way out was the way we had come in, by river barge and on foot. Otherwise, the only certain exit was a grave, dug deep in the Arctic earth.
‘We did live in a world of our own. There were Tartars and Uzbeks, Poles and Jews. There were Russians, Mongolians, Chinese and Africans, Gypsies and Armenians. And we got on quite well, mind you. We were in the same black hole together. Within weeks of our arrival, we all looked the same. We were dressed in the same rags. Our shoes were held together with wire. We were covered in sores. Our eyes were red, our faces unshaven. We were a mess of skin and protruding bones. At night many of us did stagger around with ‘chicken blindness’, brought on by lack of food. And we smelt the same, of stale sweat and lice-infested rags.
‘We belonged to the same big, hopeless family. We were a brotherhood of no-good bastards, a nation of fools trapped on the roof of the world.’
Some dates remain indelibly carved in the mind. On 13 October 1941, Laizer Bialer and his fellow prisoners, those who had once been Polish citizens, stood in the assembly yard of their labour camp within the Arctic Circle. The brief ‘summer’ was long over, the polar cap was girdled in snow, the north winds were about to descend, and the prisoners were told they were about to be freed.
As he stood in the assembled crowd, Laizer was struck by the thought: what an odd word freedom is. Free to do what? To go where? Thousands of kilometres south-west stood the city of his loved ones, of his youth. He had not heard from them for two years. And somewhere in that vastness called the Soviet Union there were former comrades who, like Laizer, had disappeared on the trek east, in flight from the same inferno that had driven them from their homes.
Yes, he was free. And alone. The thought appealed to him in a curious way. To be alone was to feel light, to be stripped back to essentials, to a bare mattress in a three-tiered bunk, to his wired shoes and the rags on his back. But, at the same time, it brought back an almost forgotten ache, an ache he had suppressed in order to survive an exile that seemed to have no end. This is what was so curious about freedom. It seemed so fragile.
The long descent began. The former prisoners were given a ration of food and put on board a barge that conveyed them through waters that had not quite frozen over. Along the Vorkuta River they drifted, through erratic currents and congregations of ice. The land about them retreated against the encroaching darkness. Mist-filled days became extended twilights which were engulfed by expanding nights.
Into the Pechora River the barge sailed, its bunks crowded with a cargo of freed slaves who had learnt, in the years of their imprisonment, to take each day as the first; who had come to realise it does not pay to get carried away by brittle hopes. They were not surprised, therefore, when the barge master, fearing for his safety upon a river that was freezing over, guided his boat to the banks and ordered the passengers off.
The band of castaways set out on a trek along the banks of the Pechora. In the days that followed, as their food supplies dwindled, and the cold took hold, there were those who fell by the way; and what Laizer recalls, above all, was the expression on their faces as they finally surrendered and gave way to the snow. Their eyes closed upon a smile that seemed to say: our journey has ended; we are out of this gehennim, but you, my dear comrade, you who still cling to life, who seem to think that there is an end to this madness, you must go on.
The ranks thinned. The larger band broke up into gangs. The gangs roved the countryside. They rested during the dwindling hours of daylight, and moved on under the cover of night. They raided villages and farms. They stole food at knifepoint. They dug potatoes out of the cold earth. They swallowed snow to appease their hunger and thirst. And when, at last, they reached the railway tracks, they leapt aboard moving trains to steal supplies, and jumped off at the outskirts of kolkhozes, where they scoured the fields for the final remains of the autumn harvest.
‘I cannot see continuity in my journey,’ repeats Laizer. ‘Only broken lines.’ We sit with our coffees in Scheherazade and we work in tandem to rejoin them. Laizer recalls a sojourn in Sverdlovsk, a city in the central Urals, and a temporary job in a power station. He recalls days lived in a torpor, weeks during which he drifted, months on end when he merely existed.
In the spring of 1942, Laizer was drafted into the Red Army. After a brief training period he was ordered to assemble with his unit at the Sverdlovsk station. One minute before they were about to depart for the front he was ordered out of his carriage. As he stood on the platform Laizer was divested of his rifle, his bayonet, his ammunition, and handed back his civilian clothing. As a Polish citizen and former prisoner he had been judged untrustworthy to take on the duties of a soldier.
Laizer was assigned to a work battalion and dispatched by train in the opposite direction, towards the town of Serov. Again he journeyed north, three hundred kilometres through the Urals, the hinterlands of an empire at war. The tracks hummed through the dark, past remote hamlets and streams, past shadowy forests and fields, over mountain passes and bridges scaling ravines.
The train moved by stations at which troops were assembling to be transported to the front. At one station Laizer glimpsed the injured en route home from the battlefields. He saw the bandaged limbs of amputees, the vacant eyes of those who had barely escaped with their lives. He sensed their anguish. He heard their collective cry, which vanished back into the darkness, reduced to snatches of conversation, the moans of disturbed dreamers, the mutterings of the sleepless.
The labourers of the work battalions lay in the crowded carriages, their bodies curled in upon themselves, as if in retreat from reality. They conjured the warmth of imaginary wombs, and relished their rare moments of respite, when constant movement and fatigue conspired to still even the most feverish minds. And Laizer realised that what he had mistaken for silence was, in fact, the crooning of the tracks, forever arcing towards an abyss; tracks which rocked and cradled the dispossessed, and evoked childhood ditties and lullabies; trac
ks which reverberated with the elusive voice of a mother singing:
Oh come now, quiet evening,
And rock the fields to sleep,
I sing you a song of praise,
Oh silent evening of mine.
How still it has become,
The night has finally come,
The little white birch tree,
Remains wrapped in darkness, alone.
February in Melbourne can be the wildest month. A hot northerly wind is gusting. It raises dust from the pavements, and whips sand across the foreshore. It caps swirling wavelets with foam, and spins buoys, yellow and red, into twirling tops. It lifts late summer leaves and pine needles from the gutters. It upturns outdoor tables and chairs, and hurls beach umbrellas from their moorings.
A gang of teenage boys huddle about their ghetto-blasters on a strip of grass above the foreshore. A cormorant struggles to stay aloft. Bathers lie spreadeagled in the shallows. An addict, lost in a heroin fix, dances beneath a palm, while her partner sways in her shadow, a beer can in each hand.
And Laizer walks the usual route, from his St Kilda flat to the cafe. His face is flushed. His nerves are frayed. The upper buttons on his shirt are undone. His shock of thinning white chest-hair bristles in the wind.
He moves from the foreshore beyond The Esplanade, to Shakespeare Grove; rounds the corner into Acland Street. He approaches the two palms, on either side of the road, recently planted, fully grown. They are two sentinels, keeping guard, he remarks to himself, aloud. He has almost reached his goal. The neon oasis is drawing him on. He is running as he bursts through Scheherazade's doors.
‘You see, Martin, you no-good scribbler?’ he says, breathless, as he sits down beside me. ‘Listen to those winds. Even here, in the golden land, we are just a breath away from chaos.’
Laizer is nervous. He cannot sit still. He stands up, paces about, returns to his seat. It will take time for him to settle down. I know the pattern well, his approach and retreat, his desire to withdraw, his conflicting need to tell. But today, more than a month since I last saw him, the contrasts are harsher than usual. The north winds are on the prowl. They are our sirocco. Our hamsin. The closest our city possesses to a desert wind.
The airconditioner hums. The cool has set in. Laizer's nerves are settling. He is calm enough to sit still; and to smile. Laizer is as warm as the north winds, but far more generous. Once a friend, he will remain a friend. A khaver. A loyal companion. After all, I have accompanied him on quite a journey now and, for this moment, at least, we are both no-good bastards taking shelter from the same winds.
Laizer describes northerly winds of a far different kind. They whirled like dervishes, in savage tornadoes of snow. They hurled hailstones into the eyes, and gnawed at the nerves with ice. ‘Martin, you are a writer, but words cannot capture it. It is impossible. You feel nature lashing you, laughing at you. You become a nothing. Your body is a mere bag of bones.’
Laizer recalls it as a time of taunting beauty, the twenty months he worked on the ancient trading route called the Vizir. For over a century the route had snaked, twenty metres wide, through the forests of western Siberia, hundreds of kilometres east, from Serov to Tobolsk.
In summer the path was submerged in impassable bogs and swamps, littered with fallen trees and encroaching forest. Russian merchants travelled the Vizir in winter. Horse-drawn sleds conveyed their merchandise in search of ‘the easterners’, hunting tribes of the taiga who exchanged furs for axes and ammunition, animal skins for vodka and tobacco. The sleds returned with the raw coats of arctic reindeer and silver foxes, polar bears and Siberian tigers.
Laizer delights in this history. The terrain was so difficult that the route was broken every thirty kilometres by stations where the merchants obtained fresh supplies and horses. Over time, the stations became hamlets. Each hamlet expanded into networks of extended families. When the children intermarried it was the custom for the woman to live in her husband's hamlet. The hamlets grew into villages that bore the name of the principal family. After the revolution the villages had become kolkhozes, co-operatives that retained the family name; and life continued, as it had, for many generations.
For those twenty months, Laizer moved east along the trading route with his work battalion, constructing towers for the Red Army. The towers were to be used to survey the terrain and determine the impacts of climatic change. There were fourteen workers in all: Russians and Ukrainians, Gypsies and Chechens, an Ingush and an Armenian; a disparate band welded by fate into a close-knit gang of frontier men.
They built makeshift roads. They dragged sleds weighed down with equipment through mosquito-infested swamps. They covered the swamps with logs to ease the way. They axed the timber into precise lengths, ready to assemble into the towers' pyramidal shape. They cut down ageing trees with which they built shelters over the ice. They slept on branches of silver birch. They spread layers of soil and moss for insulation. A permanent fire burnt at the entrance. In summer the fire smoked out mosquitoes; and in winter it provided warmth and inspired stories.
What else was there to do on long winter nights when the sun set within hours of rising? The labourers exchanged tales by a fire accompanied by the wailing of a wolf, the hoot of an owl, a sudden gust of wind. They talked about their years in prison camps, their children, wives, lovers and squandered lives. They were the heirs of a revolution that had promised so much, yet delivered so little. They had once imagined future riches, but now they lived for each passing day.
Yet there were moments which caught them unawares, and overpowered them with their beauty. More than half a century later Laizer was to recall such a moment with hallucinatory clarity.
At dawn, on a winter's day, while on the way to work, he had come across a village suspended from the sky. Snow had fallen through a breezeless night. It clung to the eyebrows and eyelashes, to his beard and rotting gloves. It contoured the trees, the cottage chimneys, the village wells and angled roofs. It engulfed every protrusion: a solitary nail, a leaning shovel, an abandoned broom.
Frozen particles floated about him, alight against a crimson sun. A strand of smoke rose from each chimney, pencil-thin, into a rouged mist. And, on these glowing strands, the village seemed to hang between the reddened sky and snow-clad earth.
Laizer knew it was an illusion, but he felt elated nevertheless. He could hear the faint song of creation, or so he allowed himself to believe. This is how things really are, it seemed to murmur. This is the perfection that underlies the chaos. This is what lies beyond the veil of suffering, beyond the betrayal you call life.
The melody ceased. The sun broke through. The village sank back into the white. Laizer stood for a moment longer, reluctant to let go; and was overcome by a profound sadness. He looked down at his ragged clothes; and felt the pangs of hunger returning, the frost flowing back into his bones.
The beauty of that image could not save him. It could not take away the pain of longing, or restore him to his loved ones. The contrast was cruel: so much beauty set against the reality of his enslavement. The universe was, after all, detached. It had lifted him so high, only to cast him back into the cold; and there was no lasting support that could cushion the fall.
Laizer turned and resumed his reluctant journey, through the forests, back to his work brigade, to another day of labour in a Siberian glade.
Laizer wipes the perspiration from his brow. He finishes his coffee, and orders another. He stirs in a teaspoon of sugar. A second. And a third. His forehead is creased in concentration. On his face there is a childlike smile, a look of wonder. He is looking downwards, at his hands, which are spread before him on the table. He is gripped by the rotation of northern skies, and the turning of seasons long past.
In spring the rivers broke loose. Rafts of ice, uprooted trees, dismembered branches, careered downstream. The conifers oozed resinous ambers and blood reds. The scent of the sap was intoxicating. Like a darkroom print coming into focus, the earth emerged in full
colour. Quilts of leaves shook free from melting snows. Crimson berries that had lain beneath the snow all winter appeared underfoot, radiant against a translucent white.
Days earlier the workers had separated into two bands at the banks of a stream. Laizer had moved on with an advance party to build the huts, and prepare the way. They waded through swamps and marshes. Water soaked their bark-plaited shoes. A week later, in heavy rains, they ran out of rations. They retraced their way to the stream and, as they drew near, they saw it had broken its banks. The stream was now a kilometre in width.
The work party lashed some logs together. They launched their primitive craft upon the river and guided it with wooden poles. Just as they were about to touch the other side, the raft crashed into an uprooted tree borne downstream by the accelerating currents.
The raft capsized. When Laizer rose to the water's surface he glimpsed a log floating by. He grabbed it, sank his axe into the log and used it as a hook to lever himself out of the swirling currents. His companions, who had swum ashore, ran along the embankment shouting instructions. When he came within reach they grabbed the log and dragged Laizer back onto solid earth.
Yes, it was a time of taunting beauty, those twenty months upon the Vizir. Each season had its allure, and its dangers. The summers were all the more glorious for being brief. The sun barely sank below the horizon before it rose again into a sky that had retained its glow. It was then that the flowers appeared, their fleeting lives compensated for by the intensity of their colour and fragrance. But, again, the beauty mocked them; summer was the season of plagues and hard labour. Mobs of mosquitoes swarmed about them as Laizer and his companions made up for lost time.
Seventeen hours a day they slaved on the towers, assembling each floor with infinite care, storey by storey, from its ten-metre base, to a sixth-level summit, two metres square; and in their rare spare moments, to appease their hunger, they trapped rabbits and arctic foxes; and reeled in fish and water fowl.