Jewels and Ashes Page 12

  Moshe comes to his aid: ‘He is right. I don’t mind if I die here. I’ve lived long enough. But for him it is different. Maybe you can find him a sponsor? A job? A wife?’

  ‘Why not Zirel the widow?’ says Marek.

  ‘One husband was enough’, laughs Zirel. ‘That is, unless you can find me a robot, someone who would never talk back.’

  ‘Oh, God in heaven,’ sings Kaminski: ‘Where does one find such a husband, a golem? So meek and so mild, a man who doesn’t ask any questions; a man who does everything he’s told; such a man is a piece of gold.’

  Romek descends to the downstairs apartment he shares with his father, and returns with a pile of letters. He pushes them into my hands. As I sort through them I see that they are from various countries.

  ‘I have many penfriends’, says Romek. ‘I am always asking them to send me a permit. None of them seems able or willing to do so.’

  ‘Enough! Leave our guest alone!’, interjects Kaminski. ‘If you want to leave so badly, find your own way to escape. As for me, I’m here to stay. This is where I’ll be buried. Let me enjoy my simche in peace!’

  Kaminski heaves himself onto a chair. He sways unsteadily as his hands extend upwards. The chair groans beneath his considerable weight as he reaches out for the chandelier and pushes it into motion. The chandelier sweeps shadows and patterns onto the walls, and we clutch each successive hour until the night finally runs out of its allotted time.

  At dawn Kaminski, Zoshia, Moshe, and Zirel accompany me out onto streets which glisten with freshly fallen rain. We stumble forward together, humming fragments of Moshe’s long-lost song:

  There’s a well in my garden with a bucket hanging

  And my lover comes to drink there every morning.

  And behind us, oblivious to our singing and joking, Romek, driven by his obsession, sticks to me like a shadow, tugging and whispering: ‘Aron! A permit! A visa! Please help me leave this black hole.’

  Over a century ago, great-grandfather Shmuel David Zabludowski regularly walked the road between Bielsk and Orla, delivering mail to remote hamlets at a time when Yiddish shtetl life was at its zenith. Great-grandfather Reb Isaac Probutski was then the sexton of a small prayer house. Of him it was said that, when he prayed, his fervour was so great all the townsfolk could hear him. ‘Ah! Reb Isaac has taken leave of his senses again’, they observed in admiration.

  Reb Isaac’s wife, Rachel the Rebbetzin, more than matched him in piety. Rachel ran a cheder for girls, where she taught the rules of orthodox conduct and the basic prayers as practised by the Slonimer Hasidim. Rachel observed every letter of the law. Mother has an enduring memory, from one of her childhood visits to Orla, of Rachel crawling under the kitchen table to remove her wig and comb her natural hair, out of sight of the menfolk, as orthodox law required.

  Generations of Probutskis and Zabludowskis lived in Orla. Where they had come from before they settled there, and exactly when they did so, I can only speculate. As for when I became aware that there existed such a place, of that too I have little idea. It seems to have always been with me, the knowledge that somewhere on this planet there was an ancestral village called Orla where, centuries ago, my forebears had emerged after years of wandering to begin life anew.

  A storm is fermenting as I set out for Orla on the back of a motorcycle. I nestle behind the driver’s leather jacket to shield myself from the gravel and clay that gush from the wheels as we ride through flash floods. My first taste of the road to Orla is of grit, hailstones, and a biting wind that penetrates to the marrow of my bones.

  We come to a halt in front of the Great Synagogue. Random blotches of peeling plaster infest raw brickwork. A pair of fat columns guard an arched doorway boarded by thick slabs of oak. The synagogue towers forty metres above me, deformed by years of neglect.

  A burst of violent wind sends me scurrying up a steep stairway ascending from a side entrance, to a room littered with bird droppings and feathers. A dozen dead pigeons lie scattered over the floorboards. Gusts of wind rip through gaps in timber panels nailed clumsily over what was once a slender arched window. Birds fly in from the storm. Feathers are sent swirling and chaos prevails.

  I make my way to the cavernous main hall. Four massive pillars arch into ceilings that rise into vaults far above. On the walls and pillars can be seen the remains of frescoes: faint bunches of grapes clinging to vines. The building, both inside and out, is clad in scaffolding: planks, beams, and platforms scale the walls and trail across the ceiling. The voices of workmen can be heard discussing the restoration. A notice outside the synagogue proclaims that this is now a protected relic. It is a crime punishable by law to deface the property. The synagogue is to become a museum.

  And the Jewish cemetery? This is different from others I have seen; it stands fully exposed, on a rise which overlooks undulating fields. Sheep graze among the twenty corroded stones. The wind is in a frenzy; flocks of ravens veer out of control, caught in spiralling air currents. On this first visit to Orla all seems in disarray, as if the primal elements are hell-bent on tearing to pieces the last decaying remains of the past.

  The next day I set out for Orla by bicycle. Several kilometres out of Bielsk the road meanders through Parcewo, a hamlet of farmers’ dwellings, sheds, and stables. The arms of an abandoned windmill stand motionless, silhouetted against a sun that has forced its way through the clouds for the first time in many days. A pair of horses drag a wooden plough: the horses snort and pant; the farmer pushes and curses. Man and beast beat the land and each other into submission, and thereby extract yet another crop from worn and weary soils.

  In the hamlet of Wolka a young farmer invites me into a yard where he keeps bees, poultry, and carrier pigeons enclosed in cages of wire mesh. Janek shows me his collection of magazines on the art of pigeon rearing, and claims he can train one to deliver messages to me in Australia. A massive Alsatian rages and strains at the leash, while a fragile kitten wanders aimlessly around the yard. Janek’s mother limps from the house and scolds him for his lack of hospitality. Together they stuff my shoulder bag with jars of honey, fresh apples, corn, and home-baked bread rolls. As I cycle back onto the road I encounter the postman. A century after Shmuel David walked this route with the mail, it is delivered by moped.

  By the time 1 ride into the cobbled streets of Orla the sky has cleared completely. A gaggle of geese waddle along the main street and hiss menacingly whenever I come close. The leader of the pack steps forward, eyeing me like a bull about to charge. Hens totter on their ungainly legs, sunflowers glow in back lanes, a chainsaw whirs, punk rock shrieks from yards where youths in tattered jeans are tinkering with motorbikes, while elderly men and women sit on wooden benches quietly gossiping.

  I approach a cottage where an old woman is attending to an array of potplants scattered about the verandah. Ivies and creepers crawl over the weatherboards and cling tenaciously to a fence that encircles the cottage. Long grass, piles of firewood, and shrubs nuzzle against fruit trees. As I draw up to the front gate the old woman stares at me intently.

  ‘Mmm. Yes … Gypsy’, she mutters eventually.

  I tell her that my grandparents and several aunts and uncles once lived in Orla; they were Jews.

  ‘Ah … Jews!’, she exclaims. ‘Probutski? Zabludowski? Yes, I did know a Zabludowski once…’ But the memory eludes her; she cannot quite place it. ‘No. There are no more Jews here’, she adds. ‘Gone. All gone. Gone a long time ago. Vanished…’

  She invites me inside. The living room is cosy, exuding the scent of musty wallpaper and worn sofas. A stuffed eagle, a masterpiece of taxidermy, leaps out from the wall over the doorway. It glares at me ferociously, wings fully extended, frozen in full flight. In a corner there stands a grandfather clock, and on the walls hang a wooden crucifix, a portrait of a Polish nobleman on horseback, and a montage of photos of the Pope.

  ‘Yes. I knew a Zabludowski once’, the old woman mutters. Again she clutches at a vague remembrance,
and again she appears to have lost it. ‘Perhaps; perhaps I knew a Zabludowski once …’

  Orla recedes as I cycle towards Bielsk at dusk. A woman sits upon a stool in the middle of a paddock and milks a cow. Farmsteads and tottering barns lean against the horizon. Green pastures yielding a late harvest fade into the night. Constellations and galaxies come to light beneath a vast turquoise dome. Yes, Probutskis and Zabludowskis did live here once; and on such a landscape, on such a night, against fields such as these, over a century ago, greatgrandfather Shmuel David, mailbag slung over his shoulders, came trudging home to a Yiddishe shtetl called Orla.

  Early morning, as I am about to leave for Bielsk station, Marek arrives unexpectedly. ‘You need not go by train’, he tells me. ‘You are our guest. We will drive you to Bialowieza forest.’

  He cannot understand why I prefer to travel alone. He becomes insistent. My refusals are a slight on his offer of hospitality.

  Marek’s car is waiting downstairs, with two companions in the back seat. The drinking has been in progress for quite a while; the floor of the car is littered with empty bottles. Whereas on previous nights the spirits had flowed with a sense of family and trust, the feeling today is very different. The protection and restraints of elders, children, and community are gone. There is an edge of frustration and raw menace in the drinking. As we speed along country roads the car almost veers out of control on several occasions. The men laugh. They have their arms around each other. They curse their small-town life. Today they are on release from prison, free to fly over the countryside and dare themselves to the brink of the abyss.

  In their eyes red rivulets are spreading, criss-crossing, flowing in circles. The men have become a mob, a herd. Join us, they are beckoning to me, and together we will rampage. The rivulets are paper thin, as too is the border between love and hatred, between their desire to overwhelm me with declarations of friendship and their desperate need to give vent to an inner rage. Welcome to the brotherhood. Together we can be a force, invincible, triumphant.

  The day crumbles into an aimless stupor, a series of taverns, liquor stores, roadside pauses to relieve ourselves in fields before again resuming our relentless pursuit of oblivion. The journey is slipping away from me. I am becoming a mere cipher in a furious charge towards an endlessly receding landscape. It is time to insist, to get out. Marek refuses; he cannot comprehend.

  ‘You want to desert the brotherhood? You want to break our oaths of loyalty? We have just begun’, he tells me. ‘The hours of the night are yet to come. You cannot leave us now.’

  It is then that I realise confrontation cannot be avoided. He must be faced directly; and when I do, I am drawn into an ocean of confusion. There are wild waves of anger, dull blotches of hopelessness, a glint of obsession. Yet there are also specks of light sparkling with the last promise of love, the barest sign that Marek can still be reached. To look away now would mean defeat, but to continue to look much longer would overwhelm me.

  Suddenly Marek awakens from his trance. He changes direction abruptly, with a look of contempt, and skids towards Bialowieza forest. The game is up; the brotherhood dissolving. Two men lie sprawled across the back seat. Marek seems broken. ‘It could have been such a great night’, he stutters, as we pull up by the Bialowieza Inn.

  Now I understand that there have been many such nights: some led by well-organised brotherhoods who have calculated their assaults before priming themselves with spirits to spur on their rage; and others, which have begun as ours today, with a show of love, an intent to create intimate bonds, and yet they too have ended with a blind charge towards darkness. And as a result the earth is soaked with blood.

  Bialowieza forest straddles the border between Poland and the Soviet Union. It comprises 58 000 hectares on the Polish side alone, within which are bison, elk, wolves, foxes, beaver, lynxes, and many species of birds and beasts on the verge of extinction. Late afternoon, and there emerges from the forest an isolated bird call, an insect’s soft shriek, a rustle and flash of reptile scurrying by, petrified at the intruder. Fungus, moss, lichens, and wild herbs cling to each other; vines, foliage, and a dense undergrowth of living and dead matter give way to meadows of wild flowers illuminated by the last light. Paths thread through groves of spruce, lindens, and maples, deep into the forest; and even here, in the remotest recesses, I come across a primitive crucifix made of oak. Beneath it is a stone and, upon the stone, figures indicating how many were executed here, in the cold shade, beneath the forest canopy.

  The country is littered with reminders: stones, plaques, monuments; in forest clearings, within open fields, on busy city streets, in village squares, by roadside shrines, and in provincial museums. In all seasons, on anniversaries that crowd the calendar from one year’s end to the other, there are candles to be lit, silent vigils to be held, and pilgrimages from abroad to be undertaken in a land stalked by smouldering sorrows. And beyond the physical borders, the echoes of what happened just one generation ago, on this soil, reverberate in the dreams of survivors scattered throughout the world; and the children of the survivors, they also have been drawn into this landscape of darkness with its aborted stories and its collective memory of suffering.

  There must be a way beyond this grim inheritance. It is as if, having come this far, I have no choice but to continue the journey, completing tales half told and half imagined, as I follow my forebears on their final trek, wherever it may have taken them, and beyond, far beyond, so that I will never have to return.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER TEN

  I MAKE MY WAY at dawn to the Palatz station, so called because here once stood the summer palace of Count Branitski. It overlooked the Bialowieza settlement, and became a hunting retreat for a succession of kings and czars. They would ride into the forest on horseback, accompanied by large retinues of cavalry and soldiers, with hunting dogs scurrying about their feet. Palaces loomed large in the Yiddish novels I consumed as a child. They would be situated on hills overlooking a shtetl in which life revolved around a synagogue, a marketplace, and a ritual bath-house. At least, this is how father describes it. ‘Take these three ingredients’, he tells me, ‘and you have a shtetl: a place to pray, a place to trade, and a place to bathe; while above, stood the world of Polish and Russian aristocracy — remote and inaccessible.’

  It was a fragile romance, my dream of the shtetl. And it was vague. I skimmed the many books father had brought with him from Poland. They exuded a scent of decay and a comforting feeling of warmth and solidity. Occasionally I came across flowers my father had pressed between pages. The Yiddish texts, in Hebraic script, revealed their meaning only in fleeting glimpses. I did not have mastery over the language. English had submerged the mother tongue; and as a child I was not seeking detail. I was content with the skimming, as a skier is more than content with a landscape that whirls past in a brilliant flash of colour.

  The romance can be felt on this cool dawn as I wait for a train back to Bialystok. On the station roof two herons perch in a nest, outlined against a pale blue sky. The moon is still visible, descending towards the upper reaches of the forest. Throughout the Bialystoku region, mists are rising and, in provincial stations, groups of peasants sit upon their luggage as sleepy station-masters signal the arrival of the first train.

  When Dorota received a blue dress on her fourth birthday, she recalled the blue hat she had recently noticed in a shop window. She crept into her mother’s bedroom, removed some money from a handbag, and ran back to the shop to purchase the blue hat. Her mother’s anger was softened by pride in Dorota’s sense of good taste. She chided her about the stolen money, but was more than pleased to allow her to keep the hat.

  Several days later, Dorota wore the blue dress for the first time. Her mother pinned a pink flower to the hat. They walked together: mother, father, two sisters, under a clear blue sky; blue upon blue with shades of pink on an autumnal landscape in a town somewhere in the vicinity of Bialystok.

  Dorota tells me t
he story forty-seven years later in a chance encounter, on a train travelling between Palatz station and Bialystok. There are countless such stories lying dormant in remote Polish towns and hamlets, always about to be told yet again, variations on a common theme, memories which refuse to fade.

  They were on the way to church. She was overjoyed with the new dress, the hat, the presence of her parents and sister. Life was an infinity of blue in which there hovered a ball of gold; and as Dorota gazed up at this expanse she noticed that, from the halo surrounding the golden ball, a silver streak had materialised and was diving towards her. The first bomb was falling; the girl was being pushed by her parents, screaming frantic instructions: ‘Run! Jump! Stay down!’ The infinity of blue was now blotted by a swarm of machines spitting fire, and Dorota’s blue dress was stained by mud as she lay on the ground in a town consumed by flames: September 1, 1939. Another war had begun. Never again would the family be together.

  Father isn’t sure when he received his last letter from Bialystok. Despite the many hours he has spent sorting out journals and letters from a past life, there never seems to be an end to it. ‘At first I lose a valued document’, he explains. ‘Then I find it again, unexpectedly, when looking for something else. So 1 put it in a new place, which I am sure I can easily locate. But then I forget where it is and I have to start searching again.’ It is as if the past refuses to allow itself to be put in order, and is always intruding into the present with disturbing hints of a world of irredeemable chaos, forever spinning out of control.

  Yet, as usual, when I press him hard enough, something seems to turn up, and father finds a letter from his brother, Isaac, dated August 1938. ‘Isaac was down to earth’, says father, ‘family oriented, ready to lend a helping hand in the toughest of times.’ He had joined Bishke as a partner in the family business, making deliveries to local subscribers. Eventually he branched out on his own, to work as an administrator in the offices of Yiddish newspapers.