Six Thousand Miles to Home

by Kim Dana Kupperman

  She had always particularly liked the part about Miriam, who had led the Hebrew women across the Red Sea, and this while playing tambourines and dancing. Mama, Suzanna thought, shared many attributes with Miriam, a woman who loved music, valued freedom, and knew how to find water where there was none. Mama had kept them alive when they were interned in the camps, and though she was exhausted now, she had made it possible for them to make this exodus out of their captivity. Suzanna took her mother’s hand and squeezed it gently. At the same time, she promised herself to set a seder table again, even if she had to do it secretly.

  The seder table and their family sitting around it—this symbolized for Suzanna all that had been lost, from the right to be with people you loved to the ability to honor, in the open, without fear of violence or imprisonment, a tradition passed down for so long. Suzanna had learned not to talk about being Jewish as they navigated the Soviet Union. She had learned to call their town by its Polish name, Cieszyn. Still, she could think on things as she liked. No one was policing her mind. Thus, the memory of her Jewish family, gathered around a table at which strangers were welcome, to celebrate their people’s great story, provided her with solace during their time in the camps, and now as they made their way out of their own Egypt. In slavery, she thought, for they, too had been enslaved and toiled. They, too, had belonged to the State, as if they were property. They had been used up, some had been disposed of, and now, she and Mama and Peter were en route to freedom. It was almost too much to have to understand.

  Goats grazed on the rocky mountainsides. At the city called Turkmenabat, they crossed into Turkmenistan. The number of buildings dwindled, and the train made its way across the Karakum Desert, all sand dunes punctuated with small, thistly shrubs. The steppe here was called the White Steppe because salt deposits spread in big white blotches on the ground. The few houses were round or rectangular. Rams were kept in simple enclosures. Camels raised their heads as the train passed, their docile expressions unchanging. Suzanna had the impression of traveling through a dreamscape in which everything was spare and whitewashed and where animals seemed to move more slowly.

  At a town called Mary, the entire transport disembarked and ate a dinner of noodle soup, buckwheat groats, and tinned meat. The army’s orchestra walked along the tracks, playing different variations of a lively and fast Polish dance. They played an Oberek, which, with the Polonaise, the Mazur, the Kujawiak, and the Krakowiak, was one of the five national dances of Poland. Chopin had imported some of these tempos into his compositions. The musicians stopped playing briefly. Suzanna watched the soldiers, men who had been starved and enslaved, make this sublime music. She felt a surge of gratitude and, even, something like love for them, for her privilege to have once played a piano, for the music itself. Songs of Poland in a desert place so far from home. Suzanna wished she could close her eyes and be whisked off to some celebration in Warsaw or Kraków, in a room where light bounced from the crystals of chandeliers. To spin with a dance partner and not worry so much about whether people thought or knew that she was a Jewish girl from a Polish town.

  26 MARCH 1942, ASHKABAT

  THE TRAIN STOPPED AT ASHKABAT for a few hours the next night. Josefina woke from the on-again, off-again slumber of long travel. From the window she saw the soldiers loading bread and soup. Peter was among them somewhere. She was proud of her son—he had worked hard. Because of his enlistment, they were now, finally, on their way to a new life. As to where exactly they would settle, Josefina wasn’t sure. Persia would be a temporary home for her and Suzanna. She’d need time to gather resources—money, visas, tickets, and such—to leave. And though she was anxious about how she might work in the new land they were headed to, Josefina was fairly determined to go to England. She recalled reading the article about Sigmund Freud’s departure to London in 1938 and sitting at her dining-room table at the house on Mennicza Street. What she didn’t yet know is that Freud had died three weeks after the war began, in September 1939, just about the time she was coming into Lwów. Josefina held an image of London as a place where she would remake her life, proud to be a citizen of England. She imagined a trim little house with a garden. Roses in the summer. A dog greeting her each morning, its nose wet and ears soft. Lace curtains. Theater and concerts. Walks in the park. Hot cocoa in the winter. A proper stationer’s.

  When they had traveled together, she and Julius always liked to visit new stationery shops. They found interesting papers on which they wrote letters during their courtship and marriage, to one another and to family. All those pretty sheets of paper, the smooth inking, the received words and their sentiments. Such a pastime, Josefina thought now, was part of the vocabulary that makes up the little language invented by people who are intimate for a long time. This language … she was forgetting how to speak it. Josefina wondered if she’d ever know what had become of her husband. Though she promised herself never to dwell on losing Julius, he seemed to be all she could think about. They had laughed together about so many things. They had walked along so many woodland paths, avenues, and corridors together, places, Josefina suspected, they might never set their feet on again. Tenderness and generosity infused their exchanges. Like the little language they had spoken together for two decades, the images connected to those moments were starting to fade. One morning, when Josefina was unable to remember the words to a poem her husband had written, it was all she could do to keep from doubling over with grief.

  The westward movement of the soldiers and civilians gained momentum. How will it all end? Josefina wondered. She gathered scraps of news and information from other travelers, but all anyone could say was that they were headed to Persia. She sensed a certain tension whenever she glimpsed one of the officers moving to and fro. Something about how they held their shoulders and the way they hurried about in their ill-fitting uniforms, the set of their brows so determined. All the men who were in charge had been in rags or threadbare clothing upon arrival at the enlistment center. They had all seen death closely and been sick with hunger, infection, infestation. Now they were briefing their subordinates and solving the ever-pressing problem of limited food rations. Josefina learned soon enough that the Polish Army was evacuating the soldiers and civilians on the transport, not simply moving them to a larger, more hospitable place than the crowded and mud-drenched Margilan. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn—and later she would—that the Soviets were hesitating on delivering what they had promised to the Polish Government-in-Exile and its army’s leader on the ground, General Władysław Anders.

  For now, though, they were moving forward and away from where they had been, and Josefina was free to let her thoughts wander among the many impressions from this tumultuous push westward through Central Asia. In her mind she composed a letter to her sister, Elsa. Dearest, she began, here I am, in a land of colorful fabric, long-lashed camels, pomegranates and apricots, squat clay dwellings. The army orchestras play music for us as we disembark and re-board the train. It is warmer here than where we were. You can’t imagine the last several seasons. I’ve seen more snow in a week than in a month at home. The mud defies explanation. A night without bedbugs is a miracle that might have you believing in God in another way.

  Of course, she’d never write that letter. Nor would she ever tell her sister how, when you’re continuously starving, you start to lose more than flesh. Hair. Teeth. Memories of things. She wouldn’t tell the story of the child Kasia fevering in the night, or that Suzanna almost succumbed to the same illness. She wouldn’t let on how frightened she was of giving in, of letting go of hope.

  Instead, if she were to write a letter to Elsa, she’d describe the Uzbek girl she had seen, the one with so many plaits in her thick, black hair. She was among the group of locals who came to the various stations on their route, to listen to the Polish Army’s orchestra play at the train station. The Uzbek men sported embroidered hats and brightly colored silk sashes around their waists. The women wore amaranth-fleece jackets over blue or white s
ilk skirts, but this girl’s was pale green. The other women were mostly mothers already, Josefina had thought, but this one, she was the youngest, not yet a bride. She pictured the girl’s smooth, nut-brown face as the train moved further and further away from Uzbekistan, mountains on the left, the unending steppe on the right. In particular, her large, black eyes, which, in the absence of any earrings or other adornment, were brighter and more perfect than any jewel Josefina had ever seen.

  27–31 MARCH 1942, ISKANDER TO KRASNOVODSK TO BANDAR-E PAHLAVI

  THE RIGOROUS SCHEDULE meant the officers and soldiers slept little. They were tasked with overseeing the orderly movement toward the Caspian Sea and maintaining decorum as limited rations were distributed to people who had been starving not so long ago. The ship that would take them out of the Soviet Union to Persia was set to sail from Krasnovodsk in several days.

  Presently the train chugged along in the shadow of the tall, gray, craggy peaks, pushing toward Iskander, a village in the shadows of the Kopet Dag Mountains. In the distance, Peter saw the hamlet, and as it came into view, he was reminded of a mud pie, its grass greening out of the puddles. Now the officers hastened to call the recruits into “efficient presentations,” as the captain called them. When they disembarked, they were to fall into formation. They were to wear their helmets, set their belongings quietly and neatly on the platform, stand at attention. No chitchat. No drinking. Food would be unloaded first. If the ladies needed assistance unloading their belongings, the soldiers were to provide it. Watch parties would be organized. The soldiers readied themselves. And do not forget, they were reminded, to salute the Soviet officers.

  At 11:30 in the morning on March twenty-seventh, 1942, the transport arrived in Krasnovodsk. The soldiers disembarked rapidly and efficiently, and along with the civilian travelers, were taken to a warehouse-like hall, where they ate a hot meal of soup and fish and drank tea. Peter was lucky to find his mother and sister in the crowd. The three of them sat in silence for a moment, as if absorbing the din of the great building and the heightened mood inside it. The people seated there were sharing a particular moment in history which was, when all was said and done, simply another day in a series of days that would become known as the Second World War. Peter would be going off to fight soon. Although he had imagined warfare as a boy, listened attentively to his father’s tales of fighting in the Great War and being taken prisoner by the Russians, Peter didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t really even know how to feel about it all, though fear and excitement mixed together, making him overly alert and a little shaky at the same time.

  Mother and Suzi were destined for more uncertainty, he knew, and though he dreaded this lack of certitude on their behalf, he also knew they had grown used to it. By way of farewell, he wasn’t sure what to say to his mother and sister. What could you say to people with whom you’ve shared the most intimate despair? Travel safely? See you in a month? It was maddening to suddenly be at a loss for words, but all Peter could think of were the events that had stripped him of being able to say a proper good-bye. They had hidden in cellars, been transported in carts and shipped out to the wilds like so much chattel, worked to the bone in the taiga. Of all the people Peter knew or had met, these two knew him better than anyone else. They had witnessed, in close proximity, his passage from boy to man. They had watched as terror crazed his expression and seen him learn to avert his gaze and appear fearless.

  He took his mother’s hands and looked in her eyes.

  “We’ll all be together again in England when this is done,” he murmured.

  Josefina smiled. Her face had barely enough energy to form into an expression. Such was the weariness that had overtaken so many women, including his mother. “Remember that your cousin Hedwig lives in London,” she said, careful not to say too much about a future she couldn’t predict, but giving Peter a way for him to find her and Suzi.

  His sister cried soundlessly when they embraced good-bye. What if we never see one another again? he wondered. “You be careful, Suzi,” he said. Though he tried to sound cavalier so as not to arouse his sister’s fear, Peter was suddenly afraid she would be harmed without him there to protect her. “I wish I could stay with you both,” he whispered in her ear. At that, Suzanna began to sob, her thin body heaving in his arms. It was the first time in a very long time that any of them allowed such feelings to surface and be expressed. Peter looked to his mother, and he understood all at once the terrible burden of being a parent who is forced to watch a child suffer.

  “I’ll be very careful,” Suzanna said at last, pulling away from Peter and wiping her face on her sleeve. “I’ll miss you, dear brother.”

  THE NEXT MORNING STARTED WITH A LIGHT RAIN. A strong wind blew in from the mountains. No more sun for the moment, Peter thought, though he also knew where they were going would be far better than where they were. Other soldiers talked about Persia, most of them confessing they couldn’t imagine it. But he could. As a boy in the early 1930s, he had closely followed—with his equally interested father—news of the excavation at Persepolis, the sixth-century city near Shiraz. A German Jew named Ernst Herzfeld, who resided in Tehran, was the chief archaeologist on that expedition, until he was forced by the Nazis to retire from his post. Peter read avidly about the finds unearthed in Darius’s great city—the cuneiform slabs, aqueducts, reliefs. Archaeology fascinated him.

  When Peter was a boy, his father had read him an English translation of the great Persian epic poem, Mantq Al-Tayr, or The Conference of the Birds. Peter had loved that story. Its author, Attar of Nishapur, started his adult life as a pharmacist. After many years of listening to his customers confide their joys, secrets, and troubles, he left his pharmacy and traveled widely, meeting with different Sufi mystics. The story had seemed a riddle. But, Peter saw now it was a profound tale about the stages of enlightenment. He wished he could say to his father how he had come to understand some of the story’s wisdom. If he tried, he could almost hear Julius telling it to him. The sound of his father’s voice—a smooth, clear baritone—was starting to fade, and Peter wondered how something so unique as a person’s voice could erode.

  “Once upon a time,” the story about the birds began, like all tales children learn from the storytellers in their lives. “A hoopoe bird was charged with leading all the birds of the world in a search for their legendary king, Simorgh.” The hoopoe, Peter knew, because he had seen one once in Poland, was a curious-looking migratory bird. It sported a crown of feathers on its head, which unfolded like a fan in displays of courtship or defense. Its wings were white, tan, or brown with wide black or brown stripes. It had a distinct call that sounded like its name.

  On their quest, the birds had to pass tests administered in seven different valleys. In the first, they were asked to free themselves of things that were precious to them. Like the birds, Peter and his family had to abandon things they treasured. In the second valley, the birds were asked to renounce reason and embrace love instead. Peter and his family had encountered strangers who welcomed, helped, or saved them and did so out of love in the form of basic decency. To embrace love also meant to have faith, and against all reasonable evidence to the contrary, he, his mother, and Suzi believed they would survive and one day leave the labor camp in the Mari El Republic.

  “As you might imagine,” Julius used to say when he told the story, “by the time they reached the next test, the birds were already reduced in number.” Worldly knowledge, they learned in the third valley, was useless. Some became confused by this revelation and lost their way. How many times had Peter seen learned men and women among the deportees—teachers and professors, clerks and lawyers, priests and rabbis—who perished because they had never used their hands or common sense?

  The fourth valley was called detachment, and there the birds—if they planned to continue on the common quest—had to renounce possession and discovery. Material wealth and empirical methods were unnecessary in front of the divine. If the first through fourth
valleys were meant as preparation to receive God, then the fifth and sixth concerned faith itself. For Peter, this was where the meaning of the story always seemed murky. When the birds reached the fifth valley, with their numbers significantly diminished, they discovered that God is beyond eternity.

  “What does that mean, Papa?” Peter asked Julius the first time he told the story.

  His father placed a hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps it means that God cannot exist within time the way we think of time.”

  Even after the first five tests, certain birds still had the courage to continue, and at the sixth valley they encountered God and were astonished by the realization that they knew and understood absolutely nothing.

  “They are not even aware of themselves,” Julius always said at this point in the story. Peter couldn’t comprehend this when he was a boy. But in the labor camp, when he worked very hard felling one tree after another, his cold, sweat, hunger, and fatigue moderated by adrenaline, there came a moment when he forgot how he had come to be in the forest laboring as he did.