Invented Lives

by Andrea Goldsmith

  Galina wanted to ask whether they really were Jewish, but knew she could not. If the best way of emigrating was to be Jewish, it would be a narrow-minded or stubbornly anti-Semitic Russian who did not take the opportunity. The irony of it did not escape her or any Jew: there was so much anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, but with the relaxation on Jewish emigration, people were suddenly rushing to be Jewish.

  Whatever the couple’s ethnicity, she was glad for their company; she even found herself regretting she was not going to America with them. She did, however, welcome them on the journey, and she needed them too, for Jewish or not, they’d done their homework. In Vienna, they knew to look for the representative from HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. She’d never heard of this HIAS, and her anxiety flared again as she wondered what else she might not know.

  ‘HIAS look after any Soviet Jew, no matter where they’re going — unless it’s to Israel, another group looks after them.’

  She’d been nervous of asking too many questions, but now, anxious to learn as much as possible before the couple left her, she did not hold back.

  ‘No,’ they said in answer to her question as to whether they had relatives in the US. ‘We’ve arranged to have relatives.’

  Through a friend of a friend who had already emigrated, an American had been found with the same surname as theirs, an American who was willing to be a sponsoring cousin.

  ‘At the moment you don’t actually need a sponsor, but we were told it speeds things up.’

  No sponsor was required for Australia either, but now that she’d learned she could be accepted into the US without a sponsor, Galina was again tempted to change her destination just to stay with these people.

  By the time they arrived in Vienna, she was more confused than ever. Torn between her choice of Australia and her overwhelming desire not to be alone, the situation had become impossible. She couldn’t manage it by herself. All she wanted was to be looked after.

  And the couple did exactly that. They took her with them to speak with the man from the Jewish Agency for Israel. It was as they had foretold, for when he heard their destinations — their loudly stated America, and her mumbled Australia — he referred them to the HIAS representative. Both she and the couple would be going to Rome, the HIAS man said, where all the requirements for emigration and immigration would occur, including the issuing of a special document, a passport substitute for stateless people, without which they would be going nowhere.

  And suddenly it hit her. What she had done. She was stateless. She was alone and she was stateless. She was no longer a Soviet citizen, she was no longer Russian. She was Jewish, that’s all she was. But being reduced to Jewishness was like the crippled boy in her block of flats, the boy with three thoroughly good limbs being reduced to his withered leg. She was Jewish and stateless and terrified.

  And what would happen if she were refused this passport substitute? Would she be condemned to a foreign no man’s land for the rest of her days? And what would she do for money? Stateless, alone, penniless: it was hard to conceive of a more wretched prospect.

  She managed to collect herself sufficiently to ask the representative how long all this might take. He said the US immigrants were being processed very quickly, a matter of weeks, but the Australian ones were taking a good deal longer, as much as several months.

  So go to America, she told herself. After all, what did it matter where she ended up? It wasn’t Leningrad, and it was without her mother. Mindless superstition was no way to select where she was to spend the rest of her life.

  It was the man from HIAS who put her back on track. He had visited Australia a couple of years earlier. His brother had settled in Melbourne.

  ‘Beautiful city,’ he said in English, ‘and wonderful climate. I was there for a week in autumn, and every day the sun was shining. Good coffee, excellent cakes. This city is greatly cosmopolitan. And the southern coastline!’ She saw the wonder cross his face. ‘You have made a very good choice.’

  ‘But the long wait,’ she was thinking aloud. ‘How will I support myself?’

  When he discovered she spoke a passable Italian, he said she’d have no trouble finding work as an interpreter.

  She never knew his name. She would have written to him and thanked him, for if not for this man, she might have fastened herself to the couple all the way to America. She would discover in time that Australia was the right place for her.

  In the years to come, those months spent in Italy were a fog. She interpreted, but couldn’t say for whom she interpreted; she translated, but could not remember what she translated. She lived in two different hostels, but she, who could draw her flat in Leningrad down to the light switches and doorknobs, could not describe either place. She was simultaneously immigrant, emigrant, and traveller-in-transit; and to new arrivals she was information and liaison officer as well. So many definitions, so many identities, but to herself she was a stranger: stateless, homeless, and alone.

  The only clear memory from that time was the disaster at Chernobyl. Every day brought a new doomsday possibility, every day brought greater distress. And it was so disconcerting to learn about her own country via Western sources: her familiar Soviet Union suddenly seemed very foreign. Soviet officials were neither denying nor confirming a nuclear accident, they simply refused to be engaged on the issue. But according to the Western press, there could be no doubt: soaring radiation levels had been registered in neighbouring countries, and a satellite had photographed an explosion in Ukraine. The evidence seemed to be incontrovertible. The only other explanation — a Western conspiracy to undermine the great Soviet state — was not credible, not from this side of the East-West divide.

  While the Soviet Union remained silent about Chernobyl, Western politicians, scientists and journalists hypothesised endlessly about the effect of a nuclear accident on human health and agriculture, both in the Soviet Union and the rest of Europe. Cut off from all those who were important to her, Galina felt squeezed between freedom and disaster. Far from feeling relief that she had escaped the danger, her own safety increased her fear for those who remained.

  By the time Gorbachev officially acknowledged the disaster, a full two weeks after the explosion, the West had already guessed most of it. Gorbachev made his announcement in what, for a Soviet leader, were uncharacteristically sombre terms; that he requested foreign assistance and expertise was incontrovertible evidence that the situation was dire. Galina wanted to do something, anything. Russia was being poisoned under a nuclear cloud, and her friends were at risk of radiation sickness, cancer, and premature death. She wanted to write to them, warn them, tell them what she knew, what the West had told her. But she held herself in check: to receive letters from an émigré would only make things worse for them.

  As she waited and worked and worried in the safety of Rome, her days were overlaid with the disaster at Chernobyl, while night after night her mother and Chernobyl clashed together in a stormy sleep. Bereaved both for mother and motherland, she felt the grief as a physical pain deep in her body. It was there every morning when she woke, and it worsened during the day. She was surrounded by food — how eagerly she had indulged when first she arrived, but now she struggled to eat. She lost weight as the nuclear cloud thickened over her country. Hadn’t the Russian people suffered enough? Hadn’t they had more than their share of disasters? Every day she read about the sufferings of the Soviet people, every day she read about the ineptitude of the Soviet leaders, every day was ringed with sorrow.

  Chernobyl was front-page news for weeks, and then other, non-Russian disasters took precedence. She found it no less distressing not knowing what was happening in the aftermath of the meltdown as it had been knowing. She was making herself ill. Her joints ached, she had a continual headache, she wanted to stay in bed all day. Unidentified Russian girl found dead in Rome. She imagined the headline.

  She turned to her new cou
ntry for distraction. She read books about Australia, she was alert to anyone with a connection to the country, and, most significantly, she saw a documentary about Italian migration to Australia. According to this film, there were so many Italians living in Australia, they had built a mighty hydro-electric scheme, started the tobacco-growing industry, owned most of the market gardens, and supplied the main labour for the building industry. Australia, it seemed, was built on the backs of immigrant Italians. The main urban precinct for Italians was located in the city of Melbourne in an area called Carlton — she grabbed a pen and wrote down the name. In the film, the Italians of Carlton were shown in cafés, eating pasta and drinking espressos, talking and laughing and smoking. Students from the nearby university sat at adjacent tables also eating, drinking, chatting and smoking. Everyone looked happy and relaxed. In the street, Italians and students clustered on the pavement, or strolled along against a backdrop that appeared to be delightfully cosmopolitan — exactly as the man from HIAS had said. This, she decided, was where she would live in Australia, this location of Carlton.

  Nine months after Andrew Morrow returned home, Galina Kogan’s plane descended towards Melbourne airport. The estimated arrival time was only minutes away, and her terror was such that she might have been heading into a KGB interrogation. The land below was mostly uninhabited. There was an occasional house, a few clumps of cows, muddy ponds, and grass that looked as dead as the winter grass at home. The nothingness stretched unconstrained to the horizon. Galina looked around at the other passengers. Were they seeing what she was seeing? Was her view of nothingness their view of home?

  She understood Melbourne to be a city of millions. Might she have been mistaken? Might Melbourne be the Australian equivalent of a Siberian outpost? With a jolt and a roar, the plane touched down. Still no people, no vehicles, no buildings. No city. The plane turned, and the air hostess announced they were taxi-ing towards the terminal. Galina stared out the window. There was still nothing to see, just the brown, empty, dried-out land. She could not possibly have mistaken the size of Melbourne. She leaned forward to take in the view through the windows on the opposite side of the plane, saw the same bristly grass, the same grim flat land, the same empty sky.

  And then — the relief of it — some buildings, airport buildings, many of them, and many international planes lined up at the gates. Only a big city would have a large and busy airport, and she sank back in her seat, closed her eyes, and tried to breathe the terror away. But it had settled in. Reason told her that in a year or two she would have marked out her new life, rendered it known and navigable. But for now, she wished she could leap across the next year or, better still, slip into a long sleep from which she would awake and find herself at home.

  The future pressed down on her — how to find an affordable flat, how to find work — but first the immediate issue of customs and immigration. Would they recognise this travel document for foreigners, this Titolo di Viaggio per Stranieri? It was stamped by the Australian Embassy in Rome, but would they know what it was here? And would they accept it as legitimate?

  A short time later, she handed the document to an official. He looked at it and said something to her. She didn’t understand what he was saying. He repeated himself. She still didn’t understand; this English was unlike any English she’d ever heard before. The man continued to speak, and at last a few recognisable words surfaced. She wanted him to slow down, speak more clearly, but wouldn’t dare ask this of an official. With a few words here and a few words there, she understood enough to respond. And she must have passed, because he waved her on to another official, a woman this time, but with the same incomprehensible English. And again she must have passed because the Italian travel document was stamped, and the official wished her ‘good luck’.

  She exited through the doors into the airport, and immediately located a card bearing her name. She was not home, but neither was she stranded.

  3

  THE RIGHT JOB FOR A SHY MAN

  Andrew Morrow nods to the technician to place the last carousel on the slide projector. There’s an air of expectancy in the hall. The woman in the front row is still knitting; her hands seem to move of their own accord as she gazes up at him. (The organisers had warned him, ‘She comes to all our public lectures, she always sits in the front row, and she always knits.’) With her fluffy cardigan falling tent-like from collar to calf, she looks like a soft pink pyramid. Only two people have fallen asleep: an elderly man whose head has slumped sideways to rest precariously close to the chap next to him, and a beautifully groomed woman sitting behind the knitter. Given this is overwhelmingly a mature-aged audience, and it is late afternoon on a hot day, Andrew thinks that two sleepers out of approximately eighty people is acceptable.

  He has titled his lecture ‘Paradise on Earth’, and in the past forty minutes has guided the audience on a mosaic journey beginning in ancient Greece, passing through the Middle East, lingering in the Byzantine era, moving on to Renaissance Rome and Ravenna, and concluding here in Melbourne.

  ‘Melbourne,’ he tells them, ‘is Australia’s mosaic capital.’

  He shows them slides of the Block Arcade, of St Paul’s Cathedral, of the magnificent floor at 333 Collins Street. Each image draws appreciative recognition from the audience. He then projects a slide of the façade of Newspaper House. This art-deco mosaic, with its near-naked figures set among symbols of scientific progress and its inspiring caption, ‘I’ll put a girdle around the earth’, this mosaic located in central Melbourne is unknown to all but a few. He hears gasps and murmurs: how can they not know of this beauty right here in their own city?

  He pauses for exactly thirty seconds — he calculated this break when rehearsing at home — a pause long enough to absorb the shock of not knowing the Newspaper House mosaic, but not so long that people will start thinking of the post-lecture wine and cheese. He looks out over the hall, slowly he moves his head from left to right as if to gather everyone in his gaze — also rehearsed at home — before arranging his features into a light smile: he has something special for them, he says. Keeping his gaze on the audience, he clicks the remote control and the first slide appears. It depicts the exterior of Leningrad’s Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, seen at a distance from along Griboyedov Canal. With its cupolas of gold and gorgeously coloured ceramics, the church looks like a fairytale castle.

  Click.

  Closer now, and the external mosaics are visible with their divine figures sparkling with gold. Also seen are the small, multi-coloured tiles capping the mini towers and arches, and the elaborate plaster mouldings around the shapely windows and panels. It is as if the art of the entire world has been incorporated on this single building.

  Click.

  ‘This,’ he says, ‘is the Church of the Saviour on the Spilled Blood in Leningrad, where I spent several months during the last European winter.’ He allows a brief pause. ‘While the exterior of the church is magnificent, as you can see, it was the interior that brought me to Leningrad.’

  Click.

  ‘Reconstruction on the interior started only recently. In its completed state, all the walls, the ceilings, the massive columns, all the surfaces will be covered in mosaic. The church is gargantuan, with soaring ceilings and nine domes. Nine, imagine it. There are side chapels and apses, corridors and a huge central nave, and all this will be clad in mosaic. But the finish is a long way off; some say five years, but the more realistic whisper fifteen. However, you, all of you here, don’t need to wait. You can see and experience the church in all its magnificence now, today, without leaving your seats.’

  Click.

  A full-colour impression of the interior seen from just inside the entrance appears on the screen. Like all the slides he will show, it is based on drawings used by the mosaicists to recreate the interior.

  ‘Let me take you through the church.’

  He pitches his voice a littl
e lower, and brings his mouth closer to the microphone. His words, intimate and mesmerising, fill the hall.

  ‘The size of the church is what first impresses. It is overwhelming, truly awesome. But a few steps into the church, it’s the beauty that takes over: it literally stops you in your tracks. Here is mosaic so abundant, so decorative, it’s hard to believe that mere mortals, just like you and me, could create anything so beautiful.’ He shifts his gaze to the rear of the auditorium. ‘You know how great natural wonders — mountains, oceans, vast deserts — make you feel small, insignificant, yet at the same time inspire wonder? The same can happen with man-made beauty. You enter this dazzlingly beautiful church, and it fills you with wonder.’

  Click.

  ‘Huge rectangular columns rise from the floor to fuse with gorgeously patterned arches in the distant ceiling. And on every panel of these columns, rising from eye level to the very top, twenty metres away, stand gigantic, halo’d men clad in flowing robes.’

  Click.

  ‘Let’s stand at the base of a column together.’ He pauses briefly. ‘At the lowest level, on a par with your eyes, are a pair of feet, feet larger than life, and somehow — these are feet, after all — they seem imbued with the sacred.’

  Click.

  ‘Lift your gaze higher, and you see velvety cloaks hanging in loose folds. These cloaks are formed from hard mosaic, chips of stone, yet they look so soft, so touchable. And see how the bare skin of feet and arms glitters. This mosaic figure shimmers with life.’

  Click.

  ‘And there are not just human figures here, but animals and exotic birds, flowers and forests. All of God’s creations cover the columns and walls of this vast space.’

  Click.

  ‘And the myriad of colours. They’re sublime. Reds, oranges, greens, yellows, pearly whites, stunning blues. And one blue in particular, not a wishy-washy Western blue, this is an intense Russian blue, with tints of sky and ocean that draw earth and heaven together.’