Jewels and Ashes

by Arnold Zable

  On the fringes of Bialystok, where the city thins and becomes forest, stands the house of Yankel, the shoemaker. The taxi draws up to his weatherboard cottage. Yankel guides us through the front garden. Sunflowers glow like lanterns in the darkness. A pair of candles light up a living-room table covered in a white cloth. Yankel’s wife, the Queen of Shabbes, greets us. She unravels our scarves, helps us off with our coats, and shows us to our seats. ‘Help yourselves’, she tells us. Buklinski needs little coaxing. He opens a bottle of vodka. ‘Time for a schnapps!’, he exclaims. ‘Time to forget!’

  It was well after midnight when Srolke finally moved away from the ruins. The streets were deserted. In the distance, like a shadow, he saw a solitary figure flitting between houses. Srolke hurried after him, drew alongside and asked, in Polish: ‘Where can I find Jews?’ The stranger stared at him as if confronted by a lunatic ‘I have seen no Jews at all’, he replied. ‘There are none here.’

  Srolke remained stranded, confused, unable to determine his next move. He noticed a light nearby, and was drawn towards a house in which he knew Jews had once lived. A Polish woman sat by the kitchen table. Srolke greeted her and asked if she knew of any Jews living in Bialystok. After a long pause she replied that she had heard there were several staying in Kupietzka 24; but she could not be sure.

  As he neared the building Srolke saw that it was severely damaged. The windows were shattered, the foyer strewn with rubbish. He climbed the stairs and entered a darkened room where he could just make out an emaciated woman sitting by a table. ‘Yes’, she replied in a barely audible voice, ‘there are Yidn living here’, and she resumed her indifferent stare.

  Srolke and the woman sat silently, lost to each other in private thought, unable to converse. Soon after, her husband entered: a bare skeleton of a man. He was hungry for information. Who was still alive? Did Srolke know the fate of this or that person? Did they have mutual friends? The same questions were asked by other figures who darted into the room from time to time, back from a day of scavenging. They were all shabbily dressed, barefoot, tired and, despite their many questions, reluctant to talk, as if afraid of hearing the sound of their own voices recalling the recent past. They quickly selected a portion of floor to sleep on, covered themselves with papers, and placed their clenched fists behind their heads as pillows.

  By the time Srolke awoke the next morning, they had all left on their daily search for food and familiar faces.

  ‘He’s going to cry! Bunim is going to cry!’, exclaims Buklinski as he dances around the table, stopping by each guest to pour another glass. Bunim’s crimson complexion darkens with each successive schnapps. Yankel’s wife serves course after course of chicken — chicken soup, roast chicken, boiled chicken, chicken pieces — a universe of chicken. ‘A Polish wife with a Yiddishe heart’, whispers Buklinski, while Yankel sits at the head of the table like a benign patriarch surrounded by an extended family.

  Bunim lifts his head and gazes at the ceiling as if about to address the Creator. His voice is cracked, almost broken, but his once rich tenor has retained at least some of its former glory. He hums snatches of Yiddish melodies. ‘Bialystok was a city with a Yiddish soul’, he muses. ‘No longer any rabbis, no longer talmudic scholars, no longer a Yiddishe city’, he laments.

  ‘And no longer Zlatke, queen of the whores! No longer pimps, thieves, and brothels on the Chanaykes!’, interjects Buklinski, as he continues his vodka-inspired waltz around the table.

  A sudden tap on the window: Buklinski’s Polish mistress has arrived. She sits on his lap while he sings Yiddish love-songs with the cracked voice of a street entertainer. Buklinski’s blood pressure is soaring. His uncontrollable energy, his manic zest for life, propel him back into wild monologues and refrains from the lanes of the Chanaykes, where his insatiable longing was first kindled, and where existence had become an eternal pursuit of touch, vodka, and love. Many years later this voracious drive to live had intensified, rather than diminished — even more so after his sojourn in Auschwitz.

  ‘How did I survive those times?’, he muses. ‘I was sharp. I knew where to be and where not to be. I sidestepped, stayed alert, made myself useful, and remained silent:

  I dreamt of you, my dear one,

  I dreamt of you day and night.

  I dreamt of your dark black eyes,

  And awoke in sickness and fright.

  Oh little bird, my dear heart,

  Please be for a moment still.

  Tend to the fire in my heart,

  And do with me what you will.

  October 1944. The twisted dome of the Great Synagogue lies charred in a field of rubble. Bialystok is a liberated zone behind the Soviet front. To the west the dying embers of a protracted war continue to flicker as the Allied armies close in on a crumbling Third Reich. Srolke Kott and his companions spend their nights in an abandoned building, Kupietzka 29, huddled against the elements. Cold winds find easy access through broken windows. A wick stuffed into a bottle of oil glows within a dim light. For hours on end they reminisce: fellow survivors keeping each other warm with endless tales of the other life they had known.

  On Yom Kippur eve, one of them suggests they attend a Kol Nidre service he has heard is being held in a house on Ulitza Mlynowa. After all there is nothing else to do, nowhere else to go; and the way is easy, direct. Instead of the maze of alleys around which they would have had to wind in former times, there are empty spaces and vacant lots between the houses still standing.

  Mlynowa 157. A small room. By the eastern wall stands a table laden with blazing candles. The room is packed with up to forty people, of whom only half a dozen or so are women. There are no children or elderly men. No one is wearing prayer shawls or white kitlech as basic ritual requires. Many are dressed in worn and weathered clothes. The men are unshaven, dishevelled. Among those present are Red Army officers, soldiers of the New Polish Army, and some who have travelled to the service from outlying villages.

  A cantor conducts the prayers, but very few appear to be listening. Most seem locked in their private grief. A senior Red Army officer stands sobbing, a prayer-book clutched to a chest lined with medals. Srolke observes a man with a large moustache, leaning on a cane, a crucifix dangling around his neck — in appearance a Pole. He joins the rest of the makeshift congregation in their occasional cries of amen.

  The room is swaying in a dream, a mirage in which reason has been turned on its head. Those present are not here to pray for forgiveness, as is the custom, but to conduct intimate conversations with themselves and a God that many had come to believe had abandoned them. One question haunts them all: can the Almighty explain? How was it possible?

  Kol Nidre, Bialystok, autumn 1944. The bare remnants of a community grieve together; and in each other’s presence they find, perhaps, a moment of solace.

  Everyone is talking of Bialystok: Bunim, Buklinski, Yankel, inundating me with anecdotes, so that at journey’s end the writer will record them, tales of the city I am on the eve of leaving, the Bialystok I had dreamed of for so many years; the city my parents had never ceased dreaming of, even as they had wanted to forget.

  I have now more than an inkling of what they felt on the eve of their departures, and why it was so hard for them to wrench themselves free, despite the constant threat and undertow of menace. Bialystok was their siren’s song, a spell that had bewitched generation after generation, an enticing melody which forever hinted at deliverance; and even when all that remained was a wasteland of rubble, survivors had still returned with the faint hope that they would rediscover their ancient vision, their lost dream.

  And to this day the very last heirs cling to their dream, served by loyal Polish wives and mistresses, at a Sabbath table laden with vodka and chicken, entranced, despite all, by Bialystok’s lingering presence, the remembrance of their youth, the protective blanket of their dwindling community, the last trace of a mother’s embrace. They lament as they celebrate a receding past that has swept by them with t
he force of a hurricane, leaving in its wake merely a song of longing which they sing repeatedly, obsessively; until, one by one, the Sabbath meal at an end, they depart into the cool autumn air, the last Jews of Bialystok.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IN CURTAIN SQUARE, the neighbourhood park, stand two rows of Moreton Bay figs, six sentinels on either side of a path. ‘They are grand old beauties’, father tells me. He taps them with his fists. ‘Rock hard’, he pronounces. ‘Each one is a sculpture, a unique individual. Each one bears its own character, its own being’, he enthuses. ‘They cling to the earth with their many roots exposed, like snakes slithering into burrows.’

  Father asks me to count the roots extending from the largest tree. There are over twenty. ‘See how they unite into a thick trunk which gives way to a spacious dome’, he points out. ‘Observe how the branches reach for the horizons. The smooth surfaces of their leaves mirror the sun and stay evergreen. They are as grand as the chestnut trees I knew in Bialystok.’

  He has known these Moreton Bay figs for over forty years, though it is only recently that I have become aware of this ‘love affair’, as he calls it. During the earlier years, when the tension had been greatest, they had become his refuge, his private temples. He would come here at night and sit beneath them, as he had sat beneath the chestnut tree of Zwierziniec in the early years of this century. A man broken in spirit can pass by them and be comforted’, father claims.

  There is a certain position, by the kitchen table, from which a window high on the wall opposite the bathroom can be seen. Here mother often sits and gazes at the upper branches of a tree. Timber frames divide the window into twelve separate squares, so that the light streams in at many angles and degrees of intensity. Sometimes it is restrained, the branches barely visible. At other moments it blazes a luminous gold. In winter the branches are thin and bare, while in spring they erupt with leaves. In her ageing, mother’s life has been reduced to a simple equation, a silence with infinite variations on tranquillity and light — concentrated, framed, contained, yet full of subtle movement and change.

  The silence is rarely broken, except for a sudden gust of wind, the distant barking of a dog, the twittering of birds. ‘They return every year’, mother announces from one of her reveries. ‘Birds can speak’, she adds. ‘They have a language of their own. They probably talk about where they have been for the past year. They perch on that tree and chatter to each other. You can hear how pleased they are to be back.’

  ‘The whole of existence is contained in words’, father claims. ‘Words are the source. They are more durable than the grass we are sitting on’, he stresses, while poking his fingers at the ground. ‘This grass must eventually fade, whereas words eternalise our experiences and express the sum total of what we have been in our lives. Words will never die, so long as there are human beings to receive them. All our knowledge and feelings can thereby be retrieved.’

  Father is now fully in his element, spinning a long thread of thought to which he clings with tenacity so that it will not escape his grasp. ‘Of course there are words which bind us to prejudice and blind faith’, he stresses. ‘Such words must be stripped naked, so that we can find our way back to the pure meaning of things, to words which do not dictate our lives and condition our thoughts’

  As father talks his whole being is in harness. ‘Words will always triumph’, he asserts. ‘I am talking of words that express our innermost feelings. In words lie their potential to break out and be released.’ As he makes this claim, father’s voice falters and gives way to tears. But, as usual, he fights them off before they overwhelm him. Yet in that moment we had both glimpsed and felt that which cannot be captured in words.

  But, of course, father tries. He tells me that in his tears he had sensed both his greatest happiness and regret. Happiness, because he had realised that, at last, he had been fully understood. His words had been received. Regret, because he knows that soon he must leave this world he has come to love so dearly. And, he concedes, there are moments which move beyond words. ‘Perhaps this is what can be called a zisser toit, a sweet death’, he muses. ‘Perhaps this is what we are striving for after all — a silence, a zisser toit, beyond all memory and words.’

  My earliest of memories: a rare gathering of relatives and Old World friends after a day of picnicking. I am feeling my way through a forest of legs. Smoke drifts down between the trees. As I crawl beside them, I come across a white object. I grasp it in my hands and weave my way through the forest until I find mother. She bends over, lifts me up, and carries me to the kitchen where she performs her feat of magic. She drops the dented ping-pong ball into a kettle of boiling water and, minutes later, it re-emerges, smooth, restored, fully rounded, a glowing white sphere.