Jewels and Ashes Page 4

  In 1914, when the first bombs rained down upon Bialystok, Zachariah clambered onto the roof of the building in which the Zabludowski family lived. He stood on the tiles and watched excitedly as the city exploded around him. Sheine Liberman poked her head out of a garret window. ‘Come down, you lunatic’, she screamed. Inside, father marvelled yet again at the reckless abandon with which his brother approached life. Zachariah was enjoying himself, apparently, from his first-class vantage point, and retreated just as fragments of shrapnel landed where he had been standing moments earlier.

  Within a year the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm occupied Bialystok. Zachariah’s love of the streets became a more perilous affair: on several occasions he was among those rounded up by the occupying armies to be forced into work gangs. Eventually he obtained regular work, with a wage of sorts, as a labourer on road and railway construction projects controlled by the occupiers. And it was on these building sites that Zachariah was drawn, along with many others, to the whispers he had heard on an uncle’s verandah in pre-war times. He listened now with more attention and interest, for it seemed their time had come.

  The world had turned upside down. While towns and cities were being bombarded by shrapnel and bullets, and rival armies crawled like vermin in the trenches, a wave called Revolution was again swelling, heaving restlessly within clandestine movements, about to surge from under ground to sweep through a dying empire. There was excited talk of a new order, while the old was being torn to shreds. Political cells multiplied like countless seeds sprouting on fertile soil. The Red Messiah was about to liberate the world from all its woes.

  The wave broke. The Bolsheviks occupied Bialystok. In their wake there arrived the theatrical troupe of Sniegov and Dubrolov. I am constantly surprised that father can recall such detail. He does so only when I pin him down with specific questions. Otherwise he continues for hours on end, when in full flight, painting vast canvasses of life in those tumultuous times. He spells it for me: S-n-i-e-g-ov and D-u-b-r-o-l-o-v. Zachariah was hired to work behind the scenes, prompting from the scripts of Maxim Gorky and other revolutionary writers.

  The Bolshevik interlude was short-lived. They were driven from the city when the Polish nationalists regained control and reclaimed territory lost to the Czars over a century earlier. An independent republic of Poland emerged; Josef Pilsudski was the man of the hour.

  Zachariah chose to go east with Sniegov and Dubrolov. They toured Russia, performing plays within the fledgling Soviet Union. At about this time Zachariah took to centre stage to act out in reality the scripts he had been prompting. He left the troupe to join the Red Army. I have not been able to gather information from our fragmented fund of family remembrances about Zachariah’s involvement in the civil war between the Reds and the Whites. He lost touch with friends and relatives in Bialystok — swallowed up, it seemed, by the Revolution. Nothing was heard from him for years.

  In Red Square tourists gather to watch the changing of the guard in front of Lenin’s mausoleum. Three soldiers in olive uniform, with white gloves, knee-high leather boots, and bayonets held aloft, goose-step towards the two guards who have been standing rigidly to attention by the tomb for several hours. After the exchange three soldiers march away, goose-stepping first right, then left, stiff legged, like drunken puppets dancing a spastic waltz.

  An empire, it seems, requires such rituals, and a figurehead who personifies its authority. That figure remains Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His portrait appears on billboards and posters the length of the realm. There are sculptures of his bust in town squares, on railway stations, in government offices. There are institutes and museums devoted to his every move, the details of his life story, works, and pronouncements. He is the Holy Father of the Revolution, and Karl Marx the Holy Ghost, their portraits often displayed side by side.

  The Communist Party completes the Trinity, officiating from the central cathedral of the Revolution, the Kremlin, which stands by Red Square. Above its spires is one of the symbols of the faith, the five-pronged star. It flashes gold in the mid-afternoon sun; nearby, crucifixes reflect gold from the spires of St Basil’s Cathedral. A remnant of the old order survives, a Byzantine fantasy saved from oblivion by its bizarre shapes and gaudily painted domes and towers. From crucifix to five-pronged star: from one form of state-controlled religion to another.

  In 1926 a letter arrived from the Soviet Union addressed to Sheine Liberman Zabludowski:

  My dearest Mamushka, I live now in Leningrad. I have a wife, Tzivie, a school teacher from Riga. We have been married five years and have two sons. The oldest is four years old and we have given him the name Vladimir; the other is one and is called Ilyich. Mamushka, I miss you. We have obtained a permit so you can visit us. Come and meet your grandchildren.

  Sheine Liberman had always been very close to Zachariah, father claims. She often called him ‘ziebendl’, her ‘little seven’, because he had been born two months prematurely. She marvelled that Zachariah had grown up so tall and healthy despite spending only seven months in the womb.

  Grandmother Sheine made her way by train to Leningrad, city of canals and palaces, the St Petersburg of her childhood dreams, an inaccessible citadel in a remote kingdom. She took a long and circuitous route. Father says she lost her way somewhere deep within the Soviet empire. For several weeks she was shunted from one train to another. She travelled through cities bedecked in red. She waited in stations plastered with revolutionary slogans. She moved through towns and cities lit up at night, recently electrified — a testimony to the greatness of the Revolution, Zachariah was to tell her.

  Mamushka found her way eventually to an apartment at number twenty, Ulitza Niekrasowa, Leningrad. My father had hesitated at first, and concentrated intensely for several minutes, during which he constantly stroked his forehead. ‘I’ve got it’, he exclaimed suddenly: ‘Number twenty, Ulitza Niekrasowa’. And on his face there had appeared a triumphant smile, an eighty-year-old man overjoyed that his faculties were intact, his memory so sharp.

  Grandmother Sheine returned to Bialystok a few weeks later with wondrous stories and two jars of marmalade made by daughter-in-law Tzivie. Her ziebendl had become an important man, she claimed. He had studied, become an engineer as well as a singer, his baritone trained and refined at the Leningrad conservatorium. His job was to divide spacious apartments and redistribute them, ‘according to need’, he had told mamushka with pride.

  It was the springtime of Revolution. When Zachariah arrived home from work he would ask his elder son to step forward and stand to attention. Zachariah would salute and command: ‘Ready?’ Vladimir would return the salute and reply: ‘Always ready. Always ready to serve the people.’ Grandmother Sheine, however, had a few tricks of her own, rituals far more ancient. She told Vladimir to close his eyes, after which she massaged the sockets with fresh eggs, to protect him from the evil eye. Comrade Lenin may well have turned in his fresh grave at this sacrilege.

  Sheine Liberman’s stories of her ziebendl and her glimpse at what was taking place on the other side of the border stirred my father’s curiosity. Perhaps it was indeed the Paradise so many dreamed of at that time, especially in a Poland immured in poverty and stagnation. Perhaps there were better prospects in the young Red Empire. Father wrote to Zachariah. He poured out his ideas, his longings, his feelings to the brother he had idolized; page after page, revealing himself as if kneeling at a confessional. It was a novella that Zachariah received in the mail, father has told me.

  Zachariah’s reply was acidic, and littered with slogans and labels:

  With your present orientation and outlook, you are unsuitable for a revolutionary society. You are too much a Romantic, an individualist, a Tolstoyovich with petit-bourgeois fantasies of peaceful reform. You don’t understand reality. You dwell too much upon the beauty of nature rather than focussing on class struggle. Study the works of Lenin and Marx rather than your bourgeois poets. Identify with the workers, share their fate, and perhaps then there will b
e a place for you here.

  Father comes to me with revelations. It is as if he hoards secrets which he will release only at the appropriate time. Whenever we had talked of Zachariah there was never a hint that something tangible of his presence existed in the house — until the day father reached beneath his bed and pulled out a cardboard box in which he had stored a number of documents. He extracted a manilla envelope which he had labelled, “Sentimental”. ‘Beware of sentimentality’, the old man has often warned me. He maintains a tight rein on his feelings, and reveals them only when pressured. ‘That is why I have lived so long’, he claims.

  Within the larger envelope there is a smaller one, postmarked in Russian, dated May 25, 1926. The letter is short, written in pencil on both sides of a single sheet of unlined paper. Scrawled in Yiddish, it is far softer in tone than I had imagined from stories about Zachariah. He informs Sheine that her grandchildren often think of the babushka who had recently visited them:

  At the dinner table there are disputes over the utensils you left behind. Vladimir has appropriated babushka’s spoon, but the knife and fork have been put aside for Ilyich. The plate however, they have to share. In this way their babushka is with us at every meal.

  This was one of the last letters between the two households. It had become apparent that they were being intercepted on both sides of the border. Police agents raided the Zabludowski home in Bialystok and searched for incriminating documents. Father was detained overnight at police headquarters, interrogated, and accused of having links with the Bolsheviks. Letters from Leningrad were cited as evidence. On Zachariah’s part it was increasingly dangerous to write to Bialystok, for fear of being accused of having connections with ‘reactionaries’ and ‘foreign spies’. Correspondence ceased. Nothing has been heard of Zachariah or his family since.

  All afternoon newly married couples arrive in Red Square with their wedding entourages, to lay wreaths at Lenin’s mausoleum and to be photographed against St Basil’s Cathedral or the Kremlin. Groups of schoolchildren in navy-blue skirts and trousers, white shirts, and red neckties tour the square, their teachers fussing over them. Muscovites approach me in the streets to whisper, ‘Have you anything for sale?’ They are hungry for perfume, a copy of Vogue or Playboy, American cigarettes, a pair of blue jeans — any forbidden fruit. Long queues snake from shops and restaurants. People wait stoically, resigned, with an occasional flicker of discontent. In the subways thousands of fatigued commuters sway against each other in crowded carriages. The dominant expression seems to be an ironic smile.

  It can be felt at the edges, a faint breeze, a patient expectation; something is stirring in Moscow, in the summer of 1986. Yet the city remains at arm’s length, not quite accessible, a veil between me and the descendants of Uncle Zachariah. After all, I am in transit for just two days. My mind is on other destinations and a time far removed, when an ancestor arrived with the theatrical troupe Sniegov and Dubrolov to tour the provinces proclaiming the birth of a new order; and on a continent far distant, where under a bed there lies a frayed letter detailing the means of the distribution of grandmother Sheine’s cutlery and plate between two children called Vladimir and Ilyich.

  ‘Beware of sentimentality’, the old man has often warned. ‘That is why I have lived so long.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A TRAIN MOVES across the Soviet-Polish border. Flat fields extend to the edge of a flat universe. Haystacks criss-cross rectangular fields. Isolated homesteads shelter under clusters of pine: solid mansions that exude a sense of solitude, and thatched cottages that hint at warmth and intimacy. A car moves just below the horizon harmonising with the movement of the train. The Bialystoku region extends north for several hundred kilometres. A summer Sunday welcomes me quietly to the land of ancestral presences.

  The train pulls into a provincial station. Booths aflame with bunches of flowers line the platforms. Customers make their last-moment purchases which they present, soon after, to a friend or relative who has just disembarked. Scouts carrying knapsacks file by. There is little regimentation; rather, a sense of ease on a casual Sunday of open-necked shirts, unhurried conversation, cotton skirts, and flowers.

  The journey has become one flowing movement that now conveys me across the Vistula and down into underground tubes which curve beneath a sprawling metropolis. Warsaw Centralny Station. I walk from the station with a rucksack on my shoulders. The heart of the city is deserted and silent. I am within that still point which rests between breaths. There is no longer the sense of urgency I have felt so often since I first planned this journey, no longer any need to hurry.

  Everyone seems to have a different estimate. Some claim there are several thousand, scattered throughout the metropolis in isolated pockets. Others say, with annoyance, ‘Don’t listen to such grandmothers’ tales; there are no more than a few hundred, and most of them are old, receding into the shadows you are pursuing. The one place you can be certain, well, almost certain, of finding more than a quorum assembled at any one time, is within the newly restored Warsaw synagogue, on the Sabbath. Postpone your journey until the weekend. Bialystok can wait a few days. And besides, what do you think you will discover there? The Messiah? Here at least there are some Jews; there you will need a miracle to find just one.’

  Warsaw synagogue, mid morning. Of the fifty or so in attendance, about half are immersed in prayer. The others seem restless. They pray on the move, circling the hall from one huddle of friends to the next, grabbing a quick chat here and there. A steady murmur of voices conveys the discordant tones of a Sabbath service in which Hebrew prayers mingle with a babble of conversations in Polish, Russian, Yiddish, English, and a smattering of other tongues. At times the chatter ascends above the prayers and provokes an angry rebuke from an irate member of the congregation: ‘Enough already! Have you forgotten what we are here for?’

  Newcomers are instantly noticed and greeted warmly. ‘Shalomaleichem. Where are you from? Australia? So far away? How goes it for a Jew over there? You can speak a word of Yiddish? Step up to the pulpit and read for us a portion of the Torah. Can you give us a donation? A little something for our shul? It never hurts to give. Come. Meet our friends. Nathan! What do you know? A Jew from Melbourne.’

  Nathan Berman shakes my hand vigorously. He greets me with a booming voice which issues from somewhere deep within his considerable frame, as if driven by a bellows that pumps forth an enveloping warmth. His words resonate through the prayer hall. ‘Sshhh. Be quiet! Have you forgotten what we are here for?’, comes the voice of admonition from the bowels of the chamber.

  Nathan is a large man spread wide and tall. His luxuriant eyebrows arch in perfect symmetry and add a touch of the aristocratic to his weathered face. Tufts of hair spring from an otherwise glistening pate; reddish clumps which, like the eyebrows, are tinged with grey. He is about sixty, but robust, exhaling rapid-fire talk with an urgency that hints at a fear of boredom and lonely nights.

  A man must enjoy life and keep moving’, he exclaims, his body heaving and sweating as we climb the wooden staircase which spirals from an inconspicuous back entrance to the synagogue. I have gathered from him, so far, that he is a professor of mathematics, retired. He was born in Warsaw, stumbled in adolescence through the war years, emigrated to Palestine, and has lived for decades in New York. But his heart gravitates here, he tells me more than once, and he comes every year now, for several months. ‘It’s a madness. Yet somehow, in Poland I feel most at ease. It has the smell of my childhood and a distant remembrance of the womb. I have a flat in Warsaw, and a girlfriend. She’s a Poilishe. She knows how to look after me: a true sweetheart. Sometimes, mind you, she gets cold feet and runs to the priest. So let her confess! It does no harm. At such times I have many friends to spend time with. We take trips to the Tatras mountains, to Zakopane, Krakow, Gdansk, the Baltic Sea resorts, as I did during my youth. What more is there to say? This wilderness is for me a home, a habit I cannot break.’

  We emerge from the s
tairs into a crowded dining room with a dozen tables scattered over exposed floorboards. Nathan has donated a Kiddush, a little something to eat and drink for the Sabbath. We are served bread rolls and gefilte fish — imported from Hungary, Nathan informs me. On each table he places several bottles of vodka which are quickly consumed.

  The room sways with conversation. Guests circulate from table to table. A man seats himself beside me and announces, without introduction, that he has two brothers, both of whom are rabbis. ‘One lives in Brooklyn, the other in Buenos Aires. And I, may the devil have such luck, live in Warsaw, where there is no one you could call a rabbi.’

  Holding court at the same table is a visitor from New York. His face is set in a permanently sour expression. He is wearing a pink suit, mauve shirt, and a crimson tie which dangles over the gefilte fish as he proclaims: ‘My son is an adviser to the President. You’ve never heard of him? Of course not! How could you? He is no boaster. He maintains low profile.’ My newly acquired friend throws his well-worn refrain at Pink Suit: ‘I have two brothers. Both rabbis. One in Buenos Aires, the other in Brooklyn. Mermelstein is the name. Perhaps you know him?’ Pink Suit, annoyed at the interruption to his monologue, shoots back: ‘Know him? Why should I? You think I should know every Jew in New York?’