Mosaic

by Diane Armstrong

  But the joy of finding her cousins alive was mingled with grief when they told her what had happened to the rest of their family. Shortly after Srulek and his father and two brothers had been exiled to Siberia, one brother jumped off the train and returned to Poland but was later caught and shot by the Germans; the other brother disappeared never to be found, and his father died of a fever. All alone in the harsh Siberian gulag for two years, Srulek was frostbitten and hungry, but there was something appealing about this skinny teenager with large grey eyes and shy smile, and the Russians often gave him extra rations.

  After two years, along with many other Polish prisoners, Srulek was released but he had to remain in the Soviet Union. Fending for himself among tens of thousands of other homeless refugees, he had nowhere to go and nothing to eat for days except a raw cabbage he’d brought from Siberia. Pickpockets flourished and most travellers had valuables stolen. ‘I lost nothing because I had nothing,’ he wrote in his succinct style. ‘That was one time it paid to be poor.’ When he arrived in Tashkent, he lived in filth and squalor at the railway station which was crammed with refugees, many of whom became ill with dysentery and typhus. When the war ended, he was taken to an orphanage where he learned English, played sport, discovered an aptitude for nursing, dreamed of being reunited with his mother and other brothers, and longed for news from home.

  Out of the blue, a letter arrived. ‘When I saw my home address on the back of the envelope, I became so agitated that I couldn’t get myself together to open the letter,’ he recalled in his memoirs. ‘When I finally read it, the sad news struck me like an electric shock.’ The letter was from his younger brother Aron, the only member of the family who had survived.

  While Srulek with his father and two older brothers were travelling east, his mother Balcia and two younger brothers had remained in Budy Lancutskie. They were hiding in a barn when armed German soldiers found them but Balcia managed to cover twelve-year-old Aron with straw so that he couldn’t be seen. From inside the barn he could hear the shots and watched as his mother and brother fell to the ground. My mother was heartbroken when she heard about Balcia’s fate. ‘Poor Balcia,’ she kept saying. ‘She was so good-hearted and pretty with those huge blue eyes and masses of dark hair. But she didn’t have any luck in life. She married an unbending man and wasn’t happy with him.’

  For the remainder of the war, Aron lived by his wits, moving from one village to another, hiding in forests, barns and wheatfields. Once a farmer took pity on the boy and hid him in his barn until the neighbours grew suspicious and Aron had to find yet another place to hide. While he was hiding in a potato field, he was caught in the crossfire between Russian and German soldiers. Just as he lifted his head, he was spotted by a German soldier who opened fire. Making a dash towards the Vistula River, Aron jumped in and stayed submerged while the soldier searched for him. When night fell, the boy swam across the river and joined a group of Russian partisans with whom he stayed until the war ended.

  In the memoirs Srulek wrote many years later, he mused about what enables people to survive in seemingly impossible situations. ‘You never know when something terrible might turn out to be a lucky break,’ he wrote. ‘Like Siberia. I thought we were unlucky to be exiled there, but as it turned out, we were the lucky ones. You must never give up. Once you give up, you’re dead.’

  No-one who met these neatly-dressed, gentle, well-spoken young men in Sydney in 1949 would have guessed what they’d been through. Young though I was, however, I could see that the brothers were very different. Srulek had a warm nature but he had a coiled-up intensity that made him difficult to be with. With the restlessness in his large grey eyes and his vulnerable expression he reminded me of a deer, continually looking over his shoulder in case he had to flee at any moment. It was difficult to make arrangements with him. He would promise to come for dinner but then failed to arrive without letting us know, and we wouldn’t hear from him for months. ‘He’s a good-hearted chap but his nerves aren’t right,’ my mother used to say. ‘It’s the war.’

  Because of his elusive personality, we saw little of Srulek, and gradually lost touch with him over the years. It was only recently, after he had died, that his daughter Michelle sent me his memoirs. Reading them, I was moved by his lyrical descriptions and the heartwrenching recollections of his family, and regretted that I’d never got to know my cousin’s sensitive and poetic soul.

  Aron was stronger, calmer, and more down-to-earth than his brother. At the age of nine, I was flattered that a young man of twenty-one was interested in what I was doing and talked to me as an equal. He often brought me records to build up my small collection. As we talked, a wide smile would split his face, revealing protruding front teeth that were separated by a gap. His religious devotion fascinated me. He always wore a yarmulka, kept strictly kosher, and walked for miles on Saturdays rather than catch a tram. It mystified me that after being orphaned at such a young age and living by himself in fields and forests, he still maintained the lifestyle of his orthodox parents. But to Aron, it was the most natural thing in the world to follow his parents’ example. In his quiet, patient way, he would explain: ‘I was brought up in a very religious home and that’s what I want to continue in my life.’

  Every morning I walk to school with the other children in Walter Street. In the shady playground of Waverley Public School, my school friends and I skip rope, bounce balls, and drink small sun-warmed bottles of milk which we have to shake to blend the thick layer of cream at the top. At midday two pupils are chosen to bring the lunch orders. Stacked on a tray are brown paper bags with spreading patches of grease. When the lucky children bite into the pies, brown sludge oozes out. I can never convince my mother to let me buy one. ‘What’s in those pies?’ Her forehead creases like a concertina. ‘How do you know what rubbish they put in them?’ So I continue to bring rye bread sandwiches with egg and tomato which cement into a paste in the summer heat.

  My mother’s ignorance of Australian food is sometimes an embarrassment. Birthday parties are frequent celebrations in our street, and the gifts, games and party food never vary. Guests arrive with their hair freshly brushed and braided, fastened with coloured clips and tied with crisp ribbons. The gifts are always practical: hair ribbons, socks, handkerchiefs or panties. We play blindman’s buff, pin the tail on the donkey, and hide and seek, eat crustless triangles of white bread coated with brightly coloured hundreds and thousands, clusters of crisp brown mounds called chocolate crackles, tiny cocktail frankfurts dipped in tomato sauce, and sponge cake smothered in cream and topped by the appropriate number of candles which have to be blown out with one breath or your wish won’t come true.

  When it’s my turn to have a party, I explain the mandatory menu in great detail to my mother. She nods until I come to the frankfurts. ‘But what do you eat with the frankfurts?’ she wants to know. My reply, tomato sauce, doesn’t satisfy her. ‘What about potatoes?’ she persists. ‘Pickled cucumbers?’ I impress on her that frankfurts don’t need any accompaniments.

  Finally my birthday comes around and my new friends and I are sitting around the table, munching fairy bread and chattering about the new Jane Powell and Errol Flynn movies showing at the Coronet, when my mother triumphantly places a large platter in front of us. A neat mountain of cocktail frankfurts are sitting on what resembles a lake of translucent frogs’ spawn. Twenty eyes widen with disbelief. ‘What’s that?’ my friend Wally whispers to her older sister Robyn, wrinkling her little freckled nose. ‘Breakfast Delight!’ my mother beams, delighted with her solution. My guests are too polite to comment but they push the offending semolina as far away from the frankfurts as possible while I wish I could sink through the floor. I can imagine them telling the kids at school about this gastronomical faux pas. But later, when I blow out the candles on the cake in one go and all my friends chorus ‘Happy birthday, dear Disy!’, my embarrassment is forgotten as I feel a surge of happiness. Now I really belong!

  But every day
there are reminders that I live in a different world from these children for whom life is so uncomplicated and free. There are so many things I’m forbidden to do. When rain buckets down in winter torrents, they simply take off their shoes and walk to school barefoot, but I have to stay home in case I catch pneumonia. When I catch a cold, I also have to stay home. In winter I’m not allowed to eat ice cream.

  My surname is a constant source of embarrassment. Whenever I have to stand up in class and say my name, the others stare and titter and their eyes bulge with incredulity while I spell it out for the teacher syllable by syllable. ‘B-o-g. U-s. L-a-w. S-k-i.’ So when my parents discuss the possibility of changing our surname, I can’t wait to have one that won’t need spelling out. One possibility is to revert to my father’s real surname, Baldinger, but when I mention this to one of my friends, she promises to nickname me Baldy, which is hardly an improvement. I wade through my magazines in search of Anglo-Saxon surnames: Barnett, Beresford, Bourke. In the end, my parents decide to keep Boguslawski. ‘After all, this name brought us luck during the war,’ my father argues. For the rest of my single life, I cringe each time I have to say my name. My husband Michael still teases me that I only married him so that I’d finally have an Anglo-Saxon surname!

  The worst thing is that I’m not allowed to play outside like everyone else. The pavement in our street is chalked with hopscotch shapes, we throw tors and hop into heaven or into hell. In the vacant lot behind our street we re-enact the stories we’ve seen at the Saturday matinee, dividing ourselves into goodies and baddies while we rush around with make-believe swords or declaim heroic lines from swashbuckling movies. Sometimes in the midst of a dramatic scene, I glance guiltily towards our house to catch my father’s flinty look and see his imperious finger beckoning me inside. ‘Nice children don’t play in the street like larrikins,’ he says. Even though he suffered so much as a boy because of his own father’s rigid rules, that doesn’t stop him from inflicting similar restrictions on me.

  The dance between the generations never ends. I always thought I was a very liberal, permissive parent until my daughter commented recently that she had felt restricted as a child because I had been overprotective and had forbidden her to do some of the things her friends had been allowed to do.

  In time my parents discovered that although Australians were more friendly and polite than Europeans, they weren’t as forthright. The stranger who appeared at our door one day was a health inspector. Someone in the street had reported that our back yard was overgrown and unsanitary, a breeding place for rats. After poking around in the spindly grass, the inspector advised my father to keep it cut. When he said that the complaint had come from our next door neighbour Mrs Leckie, my parents were amazed. This benevolent-looking old lady in the neat apron chatted to them over the fence every day, and her duplicity shocked them. My father was un-Australian enough to ask her why she’d gone behind their backs. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked. She couldn’t answer and went inside.

  At home my parents spoke Polish to each other, but soon I was replying in English. Changing your language in childhood is not just a linguistic loss. Apart from losing a world of subtleties, nuances and connotations of the words themselves, you also lose part of yourself. Language and culture influence the way you form thoughts and express feelings. English is more concise, blunt and matter-of-fact; it has a larger vocabulary but a smaller range of emotional expression than Polish, which is the language of affection. Nowhere is this contrast more obvious than in people’s first names. While in English we truncate them into impersonal monosyllables devoid of tenderness, in Polish names are lengthened by endings which in themselves are endearments. Danuta, for instance, became affectionately softened to Danutka, Danusia, Danushka and Daneczka.

  I wasn’t aware of going through a linguistic transition process any more than a butterfly remembers emerging from a cocoon. It seems as though one moment I spoke no English, and the next I was suddenly writing compositions which were being read out to the class as examples of good writing. ‘Diane is a New Australian but she can spell better than most of you,’ the teacher sometimes said, but when I repeated this to my father, he looked doubtful. ‘It’s not good to be too clever. The other children won’t like it.’ He thought that foreign children, especially Jewish ones, shouldn’t draw too much attention to themselves.

  It seems that I’m always destined to be in a minority. In Poland I was a Jewish child in a country of Catholics, and here I’m a Jewish Polish child in a country of Protestant Australians. On Sunday mornings the children in our street go to Sunday school and come home with pictures of Baby Jesus, similar to the ones I had been given by the nuns in Krakow. The religious tolerance of Australians delights my parents, but Aunty Mania says that’s because the Protestants are too busy hating the Catholics to worry about the Jews.

  On Sundays the clanging of the ice cream van draws all of us out into the street to buy chocolate-coated bats or tubs of frozen fruit salad. My friend Kay, whose father works on the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme, plants herself in front of me, arms akimbo, eyes glinting with secret knowledge. ‘Anyway, the Jews crucified Jesus!’ she announces. Suddenly I’m surrounded by a ring of silent, accusing faces. ‘No they didn’t,’ I protest. ‘The Romans did.’ Kay tilts her head to one side. ‘The Jews killed Jesus,’ she repeats. ‘Our minister said.’ Someone starts chanting over and over, ‘Nebuchadnezzar King of the Jews sold his wife for a pair of shoes.’ I try to say that Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t even Jewish, but some of the others have taken up the chant and drown me out.

  Just then Aunty Mania turns the corner into our street, and I see her walking towards me with a smile. She mustn’t hear any of this. I know that she’s been in something called a concentration camp, and although I have no idea what that means, I sense that she’d be very upset. Leaving my friends, I skip towards my aunt and steer her towards our gate. She gives me a shrewd glance. ‘What were they saying?’ she asks. ‘I thought I heard them saying something about Jews.’ I shake my head. I don’t want her to be upset, but I don’t want her to think badly of my friends either. They never bring it up again.

  After having gone to Mass in Piszczac, attended the convent school in Krakow, and joined in the activities run by the Baptist church in Sydney, I knew more about Christianity than about my own religion. I’d never been inside a synagogue, heard Hebrew prayers or learned anything about my religion until Jewish scripture classes at primary school, when the flustered young teacher tried to teach us Hebrew songs while the boys threw paper aeroplanes and the girls whispered behind their ink-stained hands. I knew that it was now safe to admit that I was Jewish, but whenever I had to state my religion in public, I felt a weight pressing on my chest.

  My parents didn’t go to synagogue or observe religious holy days, although my mother bought matzohs at Passover and fasted on Yom Kippur. My father didn’t believe that you needed synagogues or rabbis to commune with God. When a letter arrived inviting me to join a Jewish youth group called Habonim, I showed it to him, eager to join. To my dismay, he crumpled it up and tossed it into the wastepaper basket saying, ‘You don’t need Habonim.’ He looked so angry that I didn’t pursue the subject. He still hadn’t lost his fear of belonging to an identifiable Jewish group.

  About other things, however, my father treated me as an adult and took my questions seriously. One day, watching him light up yet another cigarette, I asked why he smoked. After considering this for a few moments, he replied, ‘It’s a dirty, stupid habit. It stains your fingers, yellows your teeth, gives you an unpleasant breath and damages your lungs.’ That was the last cigarette he ever smoked. Years later he told me, ‘How could I expect you to respect me if, after telling you all that, I kept on smoking?’

  All the children in our street had a pet but my mother was adamant that she had enough to do without having an animal to look after as well. One afternoon, when ‘Uncle’ Reg Knight came home from work on his motorbike, he had a passe
nger. Attached to the handlebars was a letterbox, out of which peered the bewildered black face of a kitten miaowing piteously. ‘It’s for you,’ he said.

  Beside myself with joy, I ran inside, cuddling the trembling ball of fur. ‘What’s that?’ my mother demanded. ‘A kitten. Uncle Reg brought it home for me! Look, isn’t he sweet!’ Her frown made it clear that she didn’t share my admiration. ‘I need a cat like a hole in the head,’ she grumbled. ‘Thank Mr Knight but tell him we don’t want a cat.’

  By now I was wailing and pleading, and my mother was shouting and gesticulating.

  Above our altercation, we heard my father’s limping footsteps. ‘What’s going on here? How can I study with you two quarrelling?’ As I sobbed out the story, he tickled the white triangle on the kitten’s throat until it purred like a little motor. ‘I have enough to do without a cat,’ my mother repeated.

  ‘Mummy is right,’ my father replied. ‘But you’re a big girl. Maybe you can look after the kitten?’ I nodded gratefully. Now I too had a pet.

  Flip, whom my father named after a comedian from the silent movies, had idiosyncratic notions of hygiene. An unpleasant odour emanated from the bathroom, a musky, rancid smell we could not identify until my mother caught the culprit in the act. Flip had scrambled down the side of the bath and was peeing down the plughole. ‘You can write that down in your notebook,’ my father laughed.

  For some time I’d been recording my feelings, experiences and impressions in a notepad, and at the age of twelve I wrote my first short story and submitted it for publication. My imagination must have been overheated by my mother’s novels, because ‘The Scorpion’ was about a relationship ruined by ambition and duplicity. A young woman who longed to become an actress was offered the starring role provided that she could prove to the theatre director that she could act. He set her an unusual test. If she could convince a complete stranger that her life was in danger and induce him to rescue her, she’d get the part.