The Fig Tree Read online

  PRAISE FOR ARNOLD ZABLE AND THE FIG TREE

  ‘A deeply reassuring book, all the more so for Zable’s firmly held but quietly expressed belief in the craft he shares.’

  Age

  ‘Halfway through I realised this book was something special; by the end I thought it was something extraordinary, a blending of old and new, Odysseus’s epic of exile and return revived in telling the stories of multicultural society.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Zable can find stories in the most unexpected places. The Fig Tree is about family, home and sharing a common humanity through story.’

  West Australian

  ‘This is a beautiful book in every respect. Arnold Zable is a true storyteller: you hear his stories, not only in your head, but also in your soul…these journeys and stories will fill you with strength. Buy the book today.’

  Good Reading

  ‘Arnold Zable’s stories, both fiction and non-fiction, appear to be telling us that it is stories that define us as human, stories that tell us who we are. Finally, thankfully, with The Fig Tree, we are treated to an anthology of Zable’s own stories, so we can savour a full measure of his true-life tales at a single sitting.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  Arnold Zable is a widely published writer, storyteller and educator. Formerly a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, he has worked in a variety of jobs in the US, India, Papua New Guinea, Europe, South-East Asia and China. His books include Wanderers and Dreamers, the award-winning Jewels and Ashes and the 2001 bestseller Cafe Scheherazade. The Fig Tree CD, produced in 2003 as a companion to the book, recently won the National Folk Recording Award. Arnold Zable lives in Melbourne with his wife and son.

  the Fig Tree

  arnold zable

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Arnold Zable 2002

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 2002

  This edition published 2004, reprinted 2006, 2008 (twice), 2010, 2011

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Designed by Chong Weng-Ho

  Typeset in Garamond 3 by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Zable, Arnold.

  The fig tree

  ISBN 978 1 920885 40 3.

  1. Immigrants – Australia – Biography. 2. Storytelling.

  I. Title.

  304.8940495

  The author has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  I have a child called Alexander. I heard his first cry, cut the umbilical cord and washed the aftermath of the placenta from his body. Hours later, as I walked in the park outside the hospital, I was elated. I experienced the curious sensation that everything around me—the flowerbeds, the budding trees, the people strolling by—was both ancient and new. And since he was born, it has become more urgent for me to know the births that came before him, the missing links in the ancestral chain, the three grandparents he was fated never to know, and the fourth who would die before he turned one.

  It is this sense of loss, and wonder, that fuels The Fig Tree. Because of this, I dedicate the book to Alexander, and my wife, Dora, to the four grandparents: Lily, Athanassios, Hadassah and Meier. And to the woman who gave birth on 19 October 2001, on a sinking boat off the coast off Java. Her dream was to find refuge, a place for a new home. The boat was headed for Australia. Along with 350 fellow asylum seekers, she, and her newborn child, did not make it.

  Contents

  Telling Tales

  Singing Eternity

  The Record

  The Fig Tree

  Dancing towards the End

  Ancestral Roads

  Ballad of Mauthausen

  Walking Thessaloniki

  The Treasure

  Between Sky and Sea

  Author’s Note

  Telling Tales

  I awake to an autumn sun streaming in through the lace curtains. Alexander, my infant son, is already up. His eyes are animated, gazing about the room and through the window. ‘Come on, lazy bones!’ he seems to be saying. ‘Get out of bed! Take the morning off work. Take me to the park.’

  I carry him on my shoulders. He loves this elevated view of the world. A dog trots by, and he laughs. A magpie sings, and he engages in conversation. A leaf tumbles from a tree, and he follows its slow-motion flight. A sparrow sits on an electric wire, and he points to it. Cars move past on their Monday-morning procession to work, and he is absorbed in the miracle of their motion.

  When we reach the park I lower him down and, immediately, he is running, exploring, drinking in the morning. He picks up a stone and examines it. He comes across a red leaf and a gumnut, and brings them to me. He is a teacher, showing me how to look at things anew. From one angle, the gumnut seems like a vase, perfect in its symmetry. Turn it over, and it is shaped like a bell.

  Meanwhile Alexander is off and running again, for the sheer joy of it, over the dew-laden grass. He is a gumnut toddler in tubby motion, speaking a private language in which he seems to be proclaiming: ‘It is wonderful to be alive on this perfect day.’

  The world is new and ‘magical’. It is not a word we embrace readily. It is a word that seems to disappear from our vocabulary as we leave our childhood years behind. But this is no time for reflection. Alexander is almost out of sight. His legs have propelled him to the playground. He is climbing onto a swing, making his way towards the unknown. I am anxious, watching his every move as he clambers onto a plastic slide that is painted bright yellow. He is mesmerised by the colour, by its brilliance and clarity.

  And as he gazes at it, the faint traces of my own childhood begin to return. I recall a box of coloured pencils, lying side by side, in a tin container. They are slim strands of a rainbow. Each pencil is pure, freshly sharpened, and miraculous in its effect as I run it over white paper. There is a sensation of power in all this; the first intimations of being able to transform, to create something out of nothing, of being a magician.

  I tell Alexander the tale of the pencils. I am not sure how much he has understood, but he motions with his hands. He imitates my gestures. He repeats my naming of colours. He describes circles in the air. His imagination has been set on fire.

  And it seems obvious, there are few things so alluring for a child as a story, told face to face.

  The storyteller was once the most powerful of communicators, and the tales he or she told were far more than mere stories. They confronted the mysteries of creation. They detailed in parable form codes of ethics, guides to behaviour. Storytelling was a means of conveying tales from one generation to the next. And a story could be flexible: it could change to adapt to the times, or be retold with a different slant.

  We come into the world surrounded by stories. I grew up in a single-fronted terrace in Canning Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton. My earliest memories are of lying in bed, with the sound of my parents and their guests talking in the kitchen. Their voices seemed distant. I heard the clatter of endless cups of tea. I heard the melodic flow of that other language, Yiddish, in whic
h they spoke of worlds far removed. I strained my ears to catch fragments of tales that depicted the lives they had left behind as refugees from war-ravaged Europe. I sensed their nostalgia, and the comfort they found in recalling the past.

  On summer evenings my parents sat on the verandah while their children played on the median strip that runs the length of Canning Street. The house was bound by a wrought-iron fence. In the tiny front garden plot, an unkempt rose bush leant against geraniums interspersed with weeds. A flight of four steps ascended from the gate to the verandah.

  I stood in the shadows as my father talked to old-world friends who had dropped by for a chat. The red tips of their cigarettes described lazy circles in the dark. My father was dressed in a white singlet, leather sandals and khaki shorts. His calves were hard, smooth and ivory white. His biceps were firm. The lower-arm veins were blue tributaries that petered out into the palms. From a distance he looked like a white skeleton dangling in the dark.

  Father was animated in a way I rarely observed in his day-to-day life. Again he talked of a city on the Russian–Polish border where he had spent his youth. I do not know if he noticed how intently I was listening. Perhaps this is why, years later, I set out on a journey to the source of these tales, and returned to write a book that tried to restore his family’s fragmented past.

  I have a well-worn book at home, inscribed ‘To Arnold, wishing you all the best for your tenth birthday, from Auntie Feigl and Uncle Morris.’ The book is called Tales of the Hasidim. Edited by Martin Buber, it contains hundreds of stories, some a mere three lines in length, others pages long.

  The Hasidic movement was founded by the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, in the seventeenth century, not so long after a great calamity had befallen his people. Many thousands had been massacred in pogroms that erupted in the villages of the Ukraine. Whole communities were decimated. Those who survived were in a state of shock. It was a time to regroup and be embraced by the community. And a time to gather around the teller of tales.

  The Hasidic rebbes were master storytellers. They used their parables to help lift their people out of gloom. Their stories were acts of communion that could heal a wounded soul. Their essence was revealed in the moment of telling. The teller entered into his tale, as if possessed. These tales lose much of their power on the page. Nevertheless, I often return to the book and, each time, I learn something new about the art of storytelling.

  In Tales of the Hasidim there is a story about a rabbi whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov. ‘A story,’ he said, ‘must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself. My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that time on he was cured of his lameness. That’s the way to tell a story.’

  Ultimately, we tell stories because we must. Stories are what make us human. Stories can reveal a forgotten past. Stories can uncover hidden injustices and record the contradictory impulses that drive us. And stories link us to the wisdom of our collective pasts.

  But I have ranged too far. Alexander’s attention has been lured elsewhere. He is diverted by a sound overhead. He looks up at an infinity of blue and sees an aeroplane. I recall one of the familiar sounds of my own childhood: the neighing of a horse, late at night, weaving in and out of my dreams; the metallic clip-clop of hooves; the rattling and jingling of bottles; and the quick rhythmic steps of a man on the run, interrupted by the creaking of the front door flung wide open. And I could hear the milkman deposit the half-dozen or so bottles by the front door.

  It was a comforting sound. It had about it a feeling of orderliness and regularity. It emanated goodwill and seemed to whisper, ‘All is well in the world. While you sleep, little children, you are being well looked after.’

  I never once saw the face of the milkman. He always remained a creature of the night, of the pre-dawn hours. All I knew of him was the sound of his deliveries, the footsteps, and the final swing of the gate as he retreated, on the run, back to the milk-cart. Then, like phantoms, the horses moved on, the neighing subsided, the jingling vanished into the distance. And in the morning, as if to prove it was not merely a dream, there stood the bottles, neatly arranged by the front doormat, the glass twinkling with dew, while in the middle of the road lay a trail of horse manure.

  For father, this was gold. He would set to work shovelling the manure into a bucket, and he would run with the bucket through the house to the backyard, to his vegetable patch, where he spread the manure under an early morning sun.

  My father was a small man, but when I was small he seemed large and miraculous. Father was so big that he could not even fit into the bathtub full length. His arms drooped over the sides. His legs were bent at the knee. He was an awkward giant, perhaps as large as Alexander sees me now, especially since I have him on my shoulders again and we are moving to the far side of the park, to an enclave of trees and shrubs.

  He sets out through the undergrowth, feeling his way between branches that touch the ground. He retrieves a stray golf ball, and stares at it. The ball flashes white in the midmorning light; and when he hands it to me I recall my earliest memory. I am at a party, crawling through a forest of legs. Smoke drifts down between the trees.

  I come across a crushed white object. I clasp 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 has become smooth, round again, a glowing white sphere.

  These are images that are precious to a writer. Images I have used in stories. Images I can use in future works. Magic. Imagination. There are connections. To be a writer, perhaps, is to be in a state of childhood: to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch things in a state of openness; to be in touch with life itself.

  We return home for breakfast, which Alexander gulps down with the relish of someone who has done a good morning’s work. We drive to Ricketts Point, a bayside beach. The sea is rising from the mists. Sky and water are the same colour, a continuous vista of pale blues. Alexander is splashing through the shallows. He chases a shrieking seagull, and falls over laughing.

  We are in a Melbourne suburb and I can take my son to the sea, to a park. Yet when I glance at the pages of a daily newspaper I see the photo of a child, Alexander’s age. He sits in the dust of a refugee camp. He lives within a compound, ringed by a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. His eyes are glazed. He is traumatised. It can be seen on his face. He is one of millions on the move. Uprooted. In search of a place he can call home. This is the world that adults have created. Is life magical for him too?

  Alexander is enjoying his birthright as a human being. The world is radiant, and at peace. He is free. This is the way it should be. Even so, he is upset when I take him home and leave for work. He watches in dismay from the front gate as I drive away. He tugs at the pickets in frustration. He cries even though he is in the arms of his mother. The little tragedies are already at work. He cannot have it all. ‘Happiness, sadness, separation, and reunion,’ says a Chinese proverb. This is how it is.

  When I return home after work he runs out to greet me. He is beaming. It is a clear night. He looks up at a sky pulsating with stars, and laughs. I have come across him often, in the past few months, gazing at a reflection in a window, a bowl of oranges, a ray of sun falling across a sofa. These are unembellished moments. Moments of pure being.

  I think of my father, as he was, when I was a child. I do not recall seeing him happy in those years. He seemed preoccupied, anxious. His life had been reduced to the suitcase that he carried to the Victoria Market each day to earn his meagre keep. A tension coursed through the house. My parents were immigrants. They were from a generation that em
erged from war. Their families had vanished from the face of the earth. They were struggling to begin their shattered lives anew.

  Yet, just as my son has become a teacher, guiding me back to the pure essence of things, so too did my father live long enough to show me that there is a way back to radiance, even in old age. When he retired, at the age of seventy, he seemed depressed, impatient. In time he began to change. He went on long walks through the neighbourhood streets. He planted vegetables, once more, in the backyard. He read the beloved Yiddish writers of his childhood. And he began to write poetry again, in Yiddish, for the first time in almost fifty years.

  One of his poems, ‘Meditation on Fire’, evoked another childhood memory of mine. Every winter, father would part the makeshift curtains that covered the wood stove in the kitchen of our Carlton house. We would sit in front of the stove, roast potatoes in the embers, and watch the flames vault over the kitchen walls.

  Just months after he retired, father rekindled the flame for the first time in many winters; the flames seemed to spark his creative impulse. They drew him out of himself. He began to focus, once again, on the world around him, to see it as he had seen it in his childhood, on the other side of the globe, in the fields and forests of White Russia.

  I visited him one autumn morning and found that he was not in the house. Instead I saw his latest poem, freshly written, lying upon his desk. It was a song of praise for the beauty of that day. It spoke of the endless cycling away of all his days into an eternal past. Yet this day was a gift, its ‘face washed clean by autumn dew’. ‘Instead of writing about it,’ the poem concludes, ‘I will go out and enjoy it.’

  I knew where to find him: in Curtain Square, the neighbourhood park, seated beneath the Moreton Bay figs. And when I did, we sat side by side, in silence, father and son, beyond words, in harmony, immersed in life itself.