Jewels and Ashes

by Arnold Zable

  At Zhanlitan station I have my last view of China before nightfall. On the platform there are potplants, shrubs, flowers — an oasis of greenery. Several flower beds have been sculpted into Chinese characters, with slogans that proclaim: ‘Let the Trains serve the People and the Motherland’. One slogan, however, seems to have escaped the straitjacket of ideology and offers a true sense of welcome: ‘Let the People’s Hearts be at Ease’, it advises. Several hours later, while the passengers are asleep, I tear father’s manuscript to shreds and fling it into the darkness.

  Dawn in no man’s land: a desolate flat stretch lit up by an amber glow which has wiped out all trace of night and ushered in an eerie silence. Passengers stand in the corridors and look through windows at a slow-motion ballet. Soldiers move along the tracks with dogs on leashes. Customs officials and military police board the snail-paced train to begin their inspection. There is a bond of sorts between us, the passengers. At this moment we are united by a shared apprehension. Will we run the gauntlet successfully? Will we be allowed safe passage? Everyone seems to be under the same spell, cast by the raw face of power that confronts us at the border of a closely guarded empire.

  A young officer in knee-high leather boots and a crisp khaki uniform emerges from the mist, climbs the steps into our carriage, strides down the corridor, and orders out those who have remained seated in their compartments. He is accompanied by a teenage soldier whom he sends into the emptied compartments as one would send in a dog to pick up a scent. The soldier moves quickly — poking a torch under the seats, rummaging in every possible hiding place, his eyes darting in all directions.

  The preliminary search over, the officer enters my compartment and motions to me, indicating that I should come in from the corridor and place my luggage in front of him. He goes through the contents of my bags slowly, meticulously, with a cold and clinical detachment. I try to find a point of contact, a glimmer of just the slightest warmth. The officer is completely unmoved. He pays particular attention to my diaries and books. Each one is handed to an official who scans them, putting two aside for closer inspection elsewhere.

  The search is relentless. The seats are littered with my clothes, toiletries, intimacies. Fellow passengers stand passively in the corridors, some glancing casually in my direction. But for the most part they are distant. We no longer share a common bond of apprehension. They are now in another category, relieved to have been spared this ordeal, their passports approved and stamped. I am now apart, a suspect, an outsider.

  So this is how it is when we are placed in situations of complete powerlessness. Most of us keep quiet, it seems, lest we unnecessarily draw attention to ourselves. An instinct informs us: remain invisible, avoid eye-contact, keep out of the way. And those who hold the reins of power, they know that in their hands lies the capacity to determine the fate of others. It is a lethal pantomime that has been repeated for millennia.

  And another thought occurs during this interminable search: why was I the one, out of so many, singled out for such a thorough inspection? Was it because of a deeper anxiety? Did I give off the scent of an ancestral fear, the sort of scent which induces dogs to attack?

  A day which dawned in one empire, within an amber mist hovering over a black wasteland, ends seventeen hours later on a train moving west through another empire. The search is over, the threat and menace gone, at least temporarily, and I am exuberant, set free to ride the landscape of my childhood imaginings.

  Night becomes day, merges with night, and becomes one endless movement across Siberia. Black-clad babushkas, their hair tucked under brightly coloured kerchiefs, line the rails as we approach stations. They sell pickled cucumbers, boiled potatoes, blueberries, and salads from an array of makeshift tables and containers — from buckets, upturned boxes, wagons, and steel drums.

  In the diner we are served by a plump woman. Her greying hair is tied back in a bun; her eyes are shrewd and watchful, yet always on the brink of a bemused smile. She is a no-nonsense woman who rushes from table to table, scolding and fussing over us, while exuding a maternal benevolence that inspires a childlike trust. It is as if we are in a warm kitchen, snug and protected from the alien terrain now veiled in darkness outside our moving household. It is a time for strangers to tell their tales, to spill out life stories and dreams while babushka feeds us beetroot borscht, beef and noodles, soup swimming with vegetables, and pieces of fish laced with sour cream. There is cherry compote for dessert and vodka with which to wash down our meals. The warmth spreads and envelops us; the light appears to grow brighter, our stories more fantastic and exaggerated, while occasionally we catch sober glimpses of dark forests, mist-laden fields, and the distant twinkle of a village huddling against the Siberian night.

  The waitress is our protectress, our very own babushka — so unlike the witch that stood against a dark corner in the passage of the house I grew up in. We would creep towards her, three small children chanting: ‘Eins a zeiger die babushka shloft, zwei a zeiger die babushka shloft’ — one o’clock the babushka sleeps, two o’clock … Closer and closer we would come, our hearts pounding, our bodies tensing, daring ourselves to come within arm’s length of the slumbering witch as we neared midnight; suddenly, she would turn on us from the shadows and chase us the length of the house, along the passage, through the living room, into the kitchen, and out to the backyard. We ran in fright and joy, laughing, falling over each other, sidestepping and dodging, pursued by the menacing babushka. It was one of the few times in early childhood that I clearly recall seeing the playful side of father.

  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 infini
te 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 bee
n. 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.