Jewels and Ashes (8 page)

As I wander the streets of Bialystok for the first time I follow primitive maps drawn by my parents, indicating the various neighbourhoods they had lived in. A light rain falls incessantly. A damp veil hangs over the city and keeps me at a distance. A cat sits inside a cottage window in front of a white lace curtain. Pedestrians scurry by under umbrellas and newspapers. More than ever Bialystok seems ethereal, a dream whose texture eludes me.

A fair-haired boy appears at the window and edges in beside the cat. He stares at me with cold suspicion, until I realise that I am confronting him with my sense of disorientation. When I smile, the boy instantly reflects my change of mood. He is joined by a girl of about three, a sister perhaps, and we are drawn, the four of us, into a sort of complicity, a bond of recognition between stranger, boy, girl, and cat. Someone calls from within the house. The children withdraw. The welcoming committee has retreated; but the veil has lifted, and I find myself in Ulitza Kievska, the street where my mother lived in the years immediately after World War 1.

The cobblestones of Kievska glisten under fresh coats of rain. The moisture has subdued their colours into sombre ochres and burgundies. Kievska is a mere hundred metres long, wedged between Ulitzas Grunwaldzka and Mlynowa. Mother had placed her house at number 14, perhaps 13. Number 13 is an abandoned weatherboard. The shutters are closed, except for one which swings in and out with the breeze. Through it I can see rooms scattered with debris, loose floorboards, and broken bottles. Directly opposite is a threestorey greystone building with an arched entrance: number 10. It fits mother's description, but not the address. Numbers 12 to 16 are non existent. In their place a stone wall encloses a yard piled high with used tyres and car parts. Adjoining the yard is an unkempt garden in which vegetable patches merge with wild flowers, shrubs, and trees. Two Alsatians bark ferociously as I peer over the wall.

A horse-drawn cart turns into Kievska and pulls aside to make way for a car. An elderly couple walk along the pavement, where tufts of grass spring from gaps between the cobblestones. Kievska on this rain-soaked day seems so familiar; yet so downtrodden and desolate, empty of the souls it once housed.
Judenrein. A
gust of wind catches the shutter on number 13 and slams it back to a close.

Twenty-four hours later the sun soars above the city. The shutters on the cottages of Kievska are flung wide open. The windows frame displays of potplants. Several windowsills are a jungle of ferns and flowers which nestle together, vying like a crowd of eager spectators for a view of the street, where cobblestones smoulder under the sun, a muted blaze of faded reds and light browns.

Kievska is within the Chanaykes, a neighbourhood where impoverished Jewish families were concentrated in a whirl of alleys, narrow streets, and back lanes which still continue to snake and curve into each other like dancing dervishes. I am surprised at how intact it appears, as if history had somehow overlooked this forgotten corner of the world. On days like this, I imagine, the Probutski children, the six sisters and three brothers, would spill into the streets to play in vacant lots strewn with weeds and rubbish. Or perhaps it wasn't like that at all, and I am merely imposing such a scene on empty sites scattered throughout the neighbourhood like gaps in rows of rotting teeth.

Ulitza Zolta is a dirt path which squeezes off Kievska between several cottages before opening out into a large clearing that resembles an abandoned town square. The Probutski family shifted house in 1920, from Kievska to somewhere in this vicinity; perhaps to the two-storey building which stands apart, overlooking the clearing.

As I enter, I catch the scent of dust and rotting timber. A flight of stairs leads to a balcony which overlooks the square, but I cannot climb up to the attic that I believe my mother may have lived in. The way is barred by an old man who sits in an armchair on the first-floor landing. When I try to speak to him he does not respond. I hand him a note which Witold has written in Polish, explaining that my parents and their families may have once lived here. I am from Australia, the note adds, and I am searching for their former homes. The old man stares blankly into the distance. His head occasionally falls limply to his chest and rolls from side to side while he mumbles incoherently to himself.

As I turn to leave I see a grey-haired lady clutching a shopping bag. She eyes me with suspicion as we pass each other on the stairs. I hand her the note, which she quickly scans. The old lady is unimpressed. I am an intruder.

His apartment is on the second floor of a six-storey tenement; one of several drab grey blocks built up from the ghetto ruins in the immediate post-war years. It is now run-down, cracking at the seams, joints wracked by arthritis. The stairs smell of fried onions and neglect. I am ushered into a sparsely furnished living-room with a single bed, table, and television set on a linoleum-covered floor.

He is rotund and squat, his substantial paunch offset by muscular shoulders that barely contain an outrageous energy which seems always on the verge of bursting beyond the confines of his tight body. He speaks to me with a conspiratorial air, while his hawk-like eyes, full of an ancient suspicion, dart from side to side, always alert, distracted. Buklinski, one of the very last of the Bialystoker Jews, has burst into my life.

Buklinski disappears into the kitchen and dashes back with plates of stewed potatoes and gefilte fish. ‘Imported from Hungary', he announces triumphantly, jabbing his fingers at the fish. He runs back and forth from the kitchen, and soon the table is laden with bowls of herring, pickled onions, loaves of bread, cheeses, and several bottles of vodka. Buklinski seats himself opposite and commands, in a voice strewn with gravel, ‘
Nu
? Eat! Is anyone stopping you? Who are you waiting for? The Messiah?' He speaks a rich colloquial Yiddish laced with earth, fire, and black humour. Looking at me, he muses: ‘A miracle! Our Bialystoker have wandered off to the very ends of the earth in all their dark years, and yet their sons speak Yiddish. A miracle!
Nu
? What are you waiting for? Eat!'

The vodka flows. Buklinski's monologue accelerates. He weaves tall stories in a frenzy. ‘I was born on Krakowska, in the Chanaykes, in that very same neighbourhood your mother lived in. We were crammed on top of each other; slept three, four, sometimes more to a bed. We froze in winter, baked in summer, and roamed the streets in gangs of little scoundrels who hunted in packs, seeing with our own eyes everything the heart desired — swindlers and saints, devoted mothers and beggars, prostitutes and yeshiva boys scurrying home, their eyes glued to their sacred books as they bumped into lamp posts. Ah, what a treasure it was to live in Bialystok! Well, my friend, what else could we do but love it? You think we had a choice? Well? What are you waiting for? Eat! Drink! Don't be shy!'

Whenever one dish is empty, Buklinski dashes back into the kitchen and emerges with reinforcements, plates piled high with cheese blintzes.

‘This is my specialty, which you must eat.'

‘You are like a Yiddishe mama', I protest.

‘I'm better than a Yiddishe mama. No Yiddishe mama makes blintzes like mine.'

‘But I'm full. I can hold no more.'

‘Full. Shmul. There is always room for more. Eat! I cannot rest until I see you eat.'

Buklinski hovers around the table, restless, imploring, prodding, scolding: ‘Eat! I won't sit down until you eat!'

Where have I heard these familiar words, the same pleas, this same script? Where have I seen that same intensity, and felt that same tinge of menace in the voice? I have known other Buklinskis. They stood in Melbourne homes, by tables overflowing with food and drink, and talked of hunger and mud.

‘In two things I am an expert', Zalman would say. Zalman, the family friend, the Bialystoker, the survivor who had brought us tales from the kingdom of night. ‘About two things I know all there is to know. In these things I am a scholar, an expert, a professor. In all other things I may be an ignoramus, but on two subjects I can lecture for days on end and never come to the end of it: mud and hunger. We lived in mud. For six years we were soaked in it. We came to know its subtle changes in texture, from day to day, hour to hour, depending on the amount of rain, the number of wagons and dragging feet that churned it up, the number of work battalions that laboured through it. The ghetto was an empire of mud. And hunger. Hunger had so many nuances, so many symptoms. Sometimes you felt so light, so empty, you could fly. But always it was an infernal ache, a relentless yearning, a search for any possible thing that could be chewed and swallowed. And now I know that a kitchen must be full, and a man is a fool who does not seize a chance to eat…'

But this is no time to philosophize. Buklinski has opened a second bottle of vodka. He is up on his feet, dancing around the table like a boxer between rounds. I try to break into his monologue from time to time, but Buklinski is a bulldozer who flattens me with his manic, domineering, frenzied, suspicious, yet affectionate energy. One moment he has his arms around me, and is kissing my cheeks with joy while exclaiming how good it is to have such a guest, a son of Bialystoker come half-way around the planet, the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski, no less, whom we all knew, and who didn't know him as he stood under the town clock selling newspapers, telling us what was going on in this twisted world, and now, can you believe it, his grandson has come to us from the very ends of the earth, like manna falling from the heavens. A miracle!

And the next moment he is wheeling and dealing, and claiming all foreigners have a dollar to spare and that money grows on trees over there, while we are stuck here, in this black hole, our friends old or dead, the clever ones gone, scattered over lands of milk and honey, while we, may the devil have such luck, we languish here where there aren't even enough Jews left for a quorum. So? What would it hurt to spare us a dollar? What harm would it do to give us a little something? And just as I think Buklinski has got me against the ropes he is suddenly off and running again, propelled into the kitchen by a burst of obsessive generosity to fetch a third bottle of vodka, another plate of pickled herring.
Nu
? What are you waiting for? Drink! Eat!

The room is bursting with heat and words. Buklinski jerks off his jacket. I see tattoos on both arms: a mermaid curls around one forearm, and on the other a muddy-blue clumsily applied number sprawls through a scattering of grey hair. ‘Two years', he says quietly when he catches me looking. ‘For two years I was in Auschwitz.' All words grind to an abrupt halt. Buklinski sits at the table, his head propped up on his elbows, his gaze extending beyond me, far beyond the confines of the apartment. Tears, just one or two, replace his torrent of words. They travel crookedly along paths that weave across a face engraved with furrows and troughs, the face of a member of an almost extinct tribe, one of the last Jews of Bialystok.

Buklinski is running ahead, dragging me by the arm. ‘No one knows Bialystok as well as I do', he repeats for at least the fifth time this morning. In motion Buklinski is a tubby dynamo, fuelled by nervous energy and raw suspicion, trotting on his stout little legs. His stomach, the receptacle for a thousand-and-one meals of gefilte fish washed down by vodka, protrudes and bounces as he drives himself along. Head held high, hooded eyes squinting in the sun, nose sniffing the air, Buklinski nears the streets of the Chanaykes.

‘This is my territory, Ulitza Krakowska. Here I was born. In 1919.' His words tumble out, breathless, between gulps of air. His fingers stab at the empty space where his house once stood. The Chanaykes is an amalgam of weed-strewn clearings, cobblestoned streets, and rheumatic timber cottages. We are on home turf, and Buklinski is a weather vane registering every slight shift in the atmosphere. His arms swing in one direction, then in another, a stream of anecdotes flowing from his fingers. ‘That was a bordello', he exclaims. ‘The boss lived upstairs, there, in the garret. I often saw his face poking out of that window, eyeing the customers who used to sneak in through that wooden gate. Fifty groshen it cost for doing it standing up, and one whole zloty for doing it lying down.'

Buklinski is unable to keep still. It is as if the streets are pursuing him and that, if he were to stop for long enough, they could lure him into a web of memories that would soon suffocate him. So he keeps running ahead, with short steps, while conducting a feverish commentary: ‘This was once a prayer-house; that building housed a kibbutz where young pioneers prepared for the Promised Land. Over there stood a Hebrew college; here a Yiddish trade school.' Occasionally I register a deeper response, jolted by a sudden shock of recognition. The trade school features in my mother's repertoire of recollections; in this school she had learned to make dresses. ‘Ah! You see? I know where to take you', Buklinski proclaims triumphantly. ‘I know my Bialystok.'

On Ulitza Slonimska flocks of pigeons swoop down to perch on the window-sills of pre-war buildings. Their grey facades are a patchwork of exposed brick blotches coated with rust. We veer sharply into a narrow alley, to a timber shop-front painted clumsily in a pale blue wash. It leans askew, like a dilapidated shed on an abandoned farm. Inside the workshop Yankel the shoe repairer stands bent over a bench, cutting strips of leather. I am also introduced to Bunim, who is seated by the counter, his shoulders slumped, his head swaying as if in perpetual prayer.

‘Bunim! Get us a bottle of schnapps!', Buklinski orders. ‘Here! Take these zlotys and fetch us something to drink, something to bite.' Half an hour later the compliant Bunim shuffles back with a bottle of spirits. We tear chunks from a loaf of freshly baked bread, slice pieces of garlic and sausage, drink glass after glass of spirits, and the room blazes.

‘Aron! Welcome to Bialystok!', Yankel exclaims after each toast. The room spins about us, a blur of shelves piled high with shoes, pieces of leather, soles and heels, tacks and nails, and workbenches crowded with an array of primitive tools with which to cut and glue, hammer and sew, brush and polish, while Yankel is drinking, working, and proclaiming: ‘Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like!'. This is the refrain to which he constantly returns, as his story unfolds in a workshop saturated with the smell of garlic and sweat. ‘You cannot imagine! We were hunted like animals, swatted like flies. Wives in front of husbands. Children in front of mothers. Aron! You cannot imagine what it was like!'