The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  As the sun dropped towards the horizon, the sky met the sea in startling slashes of fuchsia, crimson and purple. Lulled by the waves slapping against the hull of the ship, Vala thought about the strange coincidences that had brought her and Viktor together and then torn them apart so unexpectedly. Sitting forward, she began telling her companions her story which sounded like a romantic novel whose ending was a mystery. She and Viktor had met and fallen in love in Teheran in the late 1930s, never dreaming that within a few years they would be forced to live apart, at opposite ends of the earth.

  ‘My father was a doctor in the Imperial Russian Army. He escaped from the Bolsheviks in 1917 and fled to Teheran where he met my mother. That’s where I was born,’ she began. Vala grew up in an international community of expat engineers and oil executives, and was educated in a French convent. ‘Were those nuns strict!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘They used to wear those wimples that reminded me of aeroplane wings, and kept a big bunch of keys that rattled on their waists. No one dared to say a word when they were around. When Mother Superior died, they told us that her spirit was still in every room, watching us, and every now and then I’d sneak a glance at the ceiling, half expecting to see her up there!’

  Vala leaped to her feet, and acted out the striding gait of the nuns, the tip-toeing of the girls and their guilty glances towards the ceiling. Her mimicry provoked so much laughter that people sitting nearby stopped talking and looked in their direction with the envy of those who have missed out on a good story.

  Her husband’s family had migrated to Russia from Germany at the turn of the century. Like Vala’s parents, they too had fled from the Bolsheviks in 1917 and settled in Teheran. Viktor was twenty-nine when they met, a sophisticated, witty engineer who was smitten by the ravishing eighteen year old just out of convent school. They married shortly afterwards, on the eve of World War II. ‘Life was wonderful in Teheran at first, but when the Russians and British occupied Persia in 1941, you wouldn’t believe it: they interned Viktor just because he was an ethnic German. They deported him to Australia as an enemy alien,’ she said, her voice trembling with indignation.

  ‘Can you imagine how I felt?’ Vala continued. ‘There I was with a newborn baby and a husband deported to a country far away. I had no idea how I was going to manage on my own, what would become of him or when we would see each other again. But it got worse. They told me I would be sent to Germany with the other wives. They said we were being “repatriated”. I was beside myself. I only had a German passport because of Viktor. Germany wasn’t my homeland. I’d never set foot in the place and couldn’t speak the language, but they didn’t want to know.’

  She paused as a gaggle of children ran past them, chasing each other and shrieking, following Anna Szput, a tall young woman who, like a Pied Piper, gathered the little ones around her and told them stories. Bored with the adults’ conversation, Pauline wriggled off the archbishop’s lap and ran to catch up with the others.

  There were many children on the Derna. The older ones, like me, had the watchful eyes and serious faces of children who have grown up in a suffocating silence where secrets are known but never spoken. Some had suffered unimaginable abuse and witnessed things no child should ever see. The smaller ones, born in the post-war fever to create new families, were burdened by the responsibility of filling the empty spaces left by dead relatives and lost kinfolk.

  Anna Szput’s three year old, Ruth, never knew her baby sister who had died of malnutrition in Siberia seven years before. Like many of the Polish Jews on the Derna, Anna and her husband were deported because they refused to accept Russian citizenship when the Communists occupied Eastern Poland. After a six-week journey in a cramped cattle car, they stumbled out to find themselves in Archangelsk, a remote region of dense forests in the Arctic tundra. Twenty years old, modest and newly married, Anna loathed having to sleep in a hut with seventy-five other Polish prisoners. None of them had ever held an axe or saw, but if they wanted a bowl of herring soup at the end of a day’s labour, they had to chop trees and saw logs.

  This became increasingly difficult as Anna’s pregnancy progressed. Several months later, she gave birth in the communal barracks with one piece of sheet around the bed and another covering her, her pain and fear compounded by embarrassment. Anna was skin and bone by then, and didn’t have enough milk for her tiny daughter who died several weeks later. She was the first to be buried in the camp cemetery which soon filled up as prisoners died of typhus and malnutrition.

  Not long after the baby died, Anna was summoned to the commandant’s office. ‘People are saying that you deliberately starved your baby because you didn’t want to have it,’ he said. Maddened by grief, she screamed at him. He was the murderer, it was his fault that she was starved and had no milk, how dare he accuse her of letting her poor child die? Infuriated by her wild outburst, the commandant picked up his revolver and pointed it at her face. Without stopping to consider the consequences, she knocked it out of his hand. When he dragged her outside, she knew that her life could end that moment. Pushing her into a freezing underground bunker, he lit a fire that smoked and smouldered, almost suffocating her, and locked the door. Three days later he let her out.

  When Hitler broke the non-aggression pact he had signed with Russia before the war and invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin found himself fighting on the Allied side, so he released all the Polish prisoners from Siberian labour camps. But being released was the beginning of a new set of tribulations. In their wanderings across the Soviet Union in search of a safe haven, Anna and her husband joined hundreds of thousands of other destitute prisoners who had no means of supporting themselves and dropped dead of cholera, typhus and malnutrition. Central Asian towns like Bukhara, Tashkent and Samarkand that had once evoked exotic images, now became synonymous with desperation, crime and death. Anna and her husband ended up in Kirghistan where she managed to find work in the hospital.

  When the war ended three years later, she was pregnant again. Although she had hoped to have her baby in Poland, the goods train they were travelling on meandered all over the countryside and little Ruth was born on straw in one of the box cars. By the time they reached Poland, she was six weeks old. On the Derna, she was a lively three year old who listened with rapt attention to the stories her mother told.

  When the noise of the children had died away, Nadezhda Alexandrovna turned to Vala. ‘Did they really send you to Germany?’ she asked.

  Vala nodded. ‘They certainly did. The other women and I were put on a convoy of buses headed for Turkey. Just before we got to the border, the buses stopped. I’ll never forget what happened next as long as I live. We were in the hands of Russian guards, rough women with harsh voices, who stripped us naked and took all our jewellery. I had to leave my poor Pauline lying on the scorching desert sand outside the tent, and of course she screamed the whole time. They even searched her nappy!

  ‘Being a Russian émigré, I was in terrible danger,’ she continued, ‘because if they had found out that I was a White Russian, they would have arrested and deported me to Siberia. So I pretended to know only a few words. But when I pleaded with one of the guards to let me keep my wedding band she became suspicious. “So you speak Russian?” she snarled. I shook my head but she gave me a threatening look and told me that my ring had to go. She took my engagement ring too, a big square cameo exquisitely carved with Grecian figures. It left a white square on my finger for a long time.’ Without realising it, Vala was stroking her finger as she spoke.

  Pauline had run back to her mother because she was hungry, and was relieved to hear the dinner gong. As they walked down to the dining room, Vala remembered another story. ‘You’ll never guess what happened in Ankara,’ she said. ‘Von Ribbentrop turned up to welcome the brave German mothers who were returning to the Reich with their children, and asked to see the youngest child in our transport. It happened to be Pauline. He must have thought that I was a Hitler-loving hausfrau, because he bent forward and kissed her
hand!’ Pauline, who couldn’t understand why they were laughing, was still examining her hand when they sat down at the table.

  Late that night, while the Derna was skirting the coast of Sicily, a few people were still loitering around the deck. The second officer leaned over the rail, moodily puffing his cigarette, waiting for his watch to end. Unable to sleep or afraid to dream, some passengers walked around the ship, hoping that the exercise and fresh air would ensure a deep sleep. A few couples found a shadowy corner to embrace, and gazed at Ursa Major which shone brightly in the sky as if for them. Those who were gazing towards the shore suddenly stared in disbelief and rushed down to wake their friends and families. ‘Come quickly! You’ll never see anything like this again,’ my father said as I stumbled out of my bunk half-asleep and followed him outside.

  I saw a river of scarlet streaming down the side of a stark black mountain, carving a wide gash into its slope. With each convulsion the mountain spewed plumes of fire that lit up the dark sky. It seemed as though, deep in its bowels, the earth had been stabbed and bright arterial blood was spurting through its gaping mouth. It was 2 September and Etna, Europe’s highest volcano, was erupting.

  Crowded against the rails, we watched in silence. It was impossible to witness this display of elemental power without attaching some symbolic significance to it. For some, the volcano was a crucible in which the forces of evil were being exorcised; for others, it was a portent, but whether it presaged destruction or redemption no one could tell.

  4

  The vast ocean with its unhurried waves that had no beginning and no ending imposed its rhythm on the passengers. Time was suspended between the old world and the new. The past was unbearable, the future unfathomable. There was only the present moment stretching into eternity and we floated on it, lulled by the gentle rocking of the sea.

  There was little sign of the teeming life that flitted and flickered beneath the surface, but occasionally someone cried out and pointed as the sea opened to reveal dolphins flipping in and out of the waves. Everyone craned over the rails to watch these playful creatures which, like good spirits, seemed to be guiding us. Seeing the dolphins reminded us of our connectedness with the natural world, and put a smile on everyone’s face. Long after they had vanished into the depths, we continued to gaze at the water, hoping to see them again.

  Lars Meder, a wiry twelve year old with reddish hair and freckles, hung over the rails, as did Helle’s shy fifteen-year-old brother Rein who was happy to have found something to relieve the monotony at last. Only three days had passed but to him it felt like three months. During the day Rein played endless games of patience while at night he surveyed the sky to identify the constellations. Arnold Ohtra also studied the night sky, noting in his journal that Orion was higher here than in the northern sky, while Ursa Major, his guiding star, was so close to the horizon that at three o’clock in the morning its beams lit up the waves.

  The Derna was slowing down. Even the smallest ships that started off as specks in the distance soon caught up, overtook us and disappeared over the horizon. Sitting on deck watching the sea, Arnold Ohtra painstakingly recorded our slow progress through the Mediterranean in his journal, each entry consisting of terse comments and statistics about the distance travelled and our slackening speed. ‘Every tub overtakes us,’ he wrote. A tradesman, he kept apart from his fellow Estonians. Most of them were professionals and he thought they regarded him as inferior.

  Within the first few days of the voyage, the passengers had organised themselves into groups according to nationality, religion and gender, congregated on their usual spot on deck and watched each other with indifference, condescension or mistrust. And within each group, sub-groups formed, depending on age, marital status and gender. Within the sub-groups, hierarchies soon divided people according to their place of origin, profession and level of education. Czechs, for instance, came from the Slovakian, Moravian, Carpathian and Hungarian regions of the country, but those from Prague considered themselves to be the only genuine Czechs. Polish city-dwellers from Warsaw, Krakow and Lwow considered themselves superior to those who came from small towns, especially those from the stetls who spoke Yiddish better than Polish. Professional people like doctors, lawyers and academics tended to group together, maintaining a superior distance from those they regarded as uneducated, common or lacking in refinement.

  When cabins were being allocated, the purser had tried to accommodate people of the same nationality together, but nationality did not guarantee harmony. One of the occupants of Topka’s cabin was a Polish woman who found close proximity to Jews so distasteful she complained to the captain that she wasn’t prepared to spend the entire voyage living among people she detested. ‘I don’t want my little girl to pick up their germs,’ she said indignantly.

  After hearing her out, Captain Papalas said, ‘You’re quite right. You should not stay in that cabin. I will show you a place you can have to yourself. Come with me.’ She followed him expectantly until he stopped and made a sweeping movement of his arm towards the ocean. ‘There’s plenty of room out there, madame,’ he said. Before she could gather her thoughts, he walked away. That night over dinner, the captain reported the conversation to Dr Frant with obvious relish.

  The passengers’ attitudes towards the captain varied according to perspective and experience. To Colonel Hershaw he was incompetent, to Sam Fiszman and the Kuplis couple he seemed an ignorant boor, while Halina Kalowski found him lacking in compassion. Dr Frant, Topka and Dorothea, on the other hand, found him fair and kind-hearted. Because he kept his distance from the passengers and was rarely seen, it was rumoured, without any evidence, that he drank.

  There was little to do on the voyage but talk about the past, present and future. Women gossiped about the husbands who didn’t understand them, the children who refused to eat or never did as they were told, or uncouth fellow passengers who left dripping underwear all over the washroom and the rails on the companionways.

  Sometimes they exchanged recipes for tortes which required half a kilo of butter, half a litre of cream and a dozen eggs. After all, everyone knew that, unlike Europe, Australia was the land of plenty.

  What the passengers knew about their destination could have fitted on a scrap of paper. Circumstances rather than preferences had dictated their choice of country at a time when few nations accepted European refugees, and fewer still admitted families and Jews. The majority assessed Australia’s advantages in negative rather than positive terms: absence of Communism, absence of persecution and distance from Europe were the main attributes that had attracted them to this far-off corner of the globe represented on the map as a pink blob, about as far south as it was possible to go. Everyone had heard about kangaroos, which many expected to see hopping along the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, while others had heard about Australians’ love of cricket and horse racing. Basing their expectations on films about the outback starring Chips Rafferty, some people visualised a cowboy country where they would ride horses and travel by horse-drawn carts in the cities.

  Within several days, most of the passengers had found a congenial group, and in the territorial way that human animals have, they’d staked out their claims on deck and felt aggrieved if outsiders usurped their place. The most desirable spots were the few that afforded some shade which was in very short supply.

  On Sunday mornings, the Christians attended religious services. Pastor Stockholm, who conducted Lutheran services, gathered the Estonians and Latvians for prayers at the stern. As they raised their voices in hymns and patriotic folk songs, the home they had been forced to abandon seemed a little closer. After centuries of foreign domination and suppression, the Estonians’ pride in their identity continued to be nurtured through language and music. When Estonia and the other Baltic countries finally won independence in 1918, it was the first time in 700 years that Estonians were masters of their own fate, free in their own land. Only twenty years later, however, the nationalist euphoria was shattere
d when the Russians invaded again, occupying Estonian naval bases at Narva, Baltisik, Haapsalu and Parnu. By July 1940, Russia had annexed all the Baltic states and mass deportations of the perceived enemies of Communism had begun.

  In the ship’s small library, the sonorous bass baritone voice of Deacon Peter Gruschajew made the hairs stand up on the necks of the Russian Orthodox worshippers. In front of the elongated Byzantine face of Christ on the icons he had brought, Archbishop Rafalsky conducted the service. Fidgeting beside her mother, little Pauline pointed at the censer which he swung back and forth until it emitted a sweetly smoky fragrance. ‘Why is his handbag on fire?’ she piped in her clear voice. Vala tugged her daughter’s arm. The things that child came out with. Standing beside them, Nadezhda Alexandrovna was praying, dignified as ever in her severe black dress relieved only by the white collar.

  Among the worshippers was the large Matussevich family, all ten of them, standing quietly with their stern father. One glance from him was enough to hush any whispering, inattention or fidgeting. Unlike other families on the ship, they had a cabin to themselves and spent most of their time in it rather than mixing with the other passengers. In the long dining room, where other children’s voices reverberated with questions, arguments and demands, the Matussevich children stood out because of their exemplary behaviour.

  They never started eating before their parents, never left the table while the meal was in progress and, what was even more astonishing, rarely talked during meals. If one of the boys grew restless or one of the younger girls started chattering, a nudge under the table from their eldest sister, or a severe look from their mother, was enough to silence them. Although some of the passengers shook their heads and muttered about military-style regimentation, everyone admired the children’s respectful demeanour towards their parents, which they all agreed was too rare nowadays.