Studying again in a foreign country was only part of Irene’s problem. To earn enough money to support the three of them, she had to take menial part-time jobs and found this degrading. When work was scarce, she rolled up her sleeves, baked German doughnuts and hawked them around on a bicycle. To me that sounds courageous, but to her it was demeaning. From her curt answers it’s obvious that this was a period of her life she would prefer to forget.
‘It takes all your energy and pride to keep going in a new country when you are regarded as an outsider. I should have returned to Germany instead of going through all that,’ she repeats, clearly upset at the recollection of those years.
While Irene was studying, she realised that her mother had a severe psychiatric disorder. For years Gretchen had continued to cling to the delusion that her son had died, even after receiving his letters, and brooded incessantly over the fact that he hadn’t come to meet them when they arrived. But as time went on, she became even more fixated and irrational. Whenever she saw a tall chimney, she became agitated, insisting that Jews were being incinerated inside. Finally Irene had no alternative but to place her in a psychiatric hospital. Gretchen Abrahamsohn died seven years after arriving in New Zealand, surrounded by nurses and patients with whom she was unable to communicate.
With her mother in hospital and unable to look after Eva, Irene was at her wits’ end trying to study, work part-time and take care of her three year old. When she discussed her problem with one of the doctors at the university, he recommended a couple who were willing to look after a child. For the next six years, Eva lived with the Arnolds and became part of a loving family where she felt happy and secure.
Recalling the surname Valentine on the door, I wonder at what stage of her life she married, but Irene shakes her head. With her huge dark eyes and small features, Irene was a fetching young woman but she didn’t trust men and never married. She changed her surname by deed poll but refuses to tell me why, although from her recollections I surmise that she wanted to cut loose from painful memories and alien connotations.
‘I named myself after Valentin, an impoverished student in a Balzac story, because I could relate to him,’ is her sole comment, along with the recommendation that I should read the book. After finishing her medical studies, she became a house surgeon in a geriatric hospital in Dunedin, and later worked as a GP in Waikato. ‘I liked being a country doctor,’ she says, ‘but it was a twenty-four hour a day job and very poorly paid.’
Before I leave, Irene shows me a watercolour she has painted of a pretty country cottage at the end of a shimmering garden. It’s the house outside Berlin where she once lived with her parents. Looking at it makes her reflective. ‘In the end all you have left is the soil and the seasons. Whenever I go back to that village, I feel I’ve come home. It’s hardly changed in all these years.’ Given her distressing experiences in that house, I marvel at the way that nostalgia has brushed out the dark shadows and painted over them in brighter hues. As we say goodbye, Irene puts her arms around me. ‘I want to give you a hug,’ she says. ‘I know I was meant to meet you.’
It’s an irresistible autumn afternoon lacquered with a golden light and on the way back to the city, Eva makes a detour to show me St Heliers Bay. As we stroll along the wide promenade that skirts the water, she talks about her turbulent life. After living with her foster-parents for six happy years, she returned home from school one afternoon to find her foster-mother in bed. This was unheard of and she sensed at once that something was wrong. That night Eva was told to pack her things because her mother was coming to collect her in the morning.
‘Just like that,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘No warning, no time to adjust. I was devastated. I’d become a real little Kiwi child living with my lovely, uncomplicated foster-parents, and suddenly I had to go and live with a woman I hardly knew, with her strange foreign ways and erratic personality.’
Musing about her adjustment to her new circumstances, she says, ‘The only way I was able to cope was by keeping my distance and guarding my own space. I don’t think the rift between us ever really healed. Too much time had elapsed and we were too different.
‘My mother has been unhappy all her life. She has always been an outsider. I suppose it was hard being a single mother in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50s. She never affiliated with Jews, but she didn’t mix with New Zealanders either. She didn’t trust men in particular or people in general, and I grew up not trusting people either. I felt like an outsider too.’
As she drops in to the supermarket to buy something for her mother, she says, ‘In some ways I’ve mothered her more than she’s mothered me. When I was finishing high school, wondering what course to take, I had no one to discuss things with or get any encouragement from. I didn’t even know I was capable of studying, so I did nursing. My mother was always working, always absorbed in herself. She didn’t guide me.’ An inveterate carer, by personality and profession, Eva takes good care of her mother. She visits almost every day, pays her bills, does her shopping and indulges her whims. ‘Mother has become paranoid lately. Sometimes she thinks that people are after her, or that her phone is bugged. She won’t talk on the phone any more.’
At the Mecca, one of the trendy little bistros that line the parade facing St Heliers Bay, we sip cappuccinos and discuss our lives. Eva met her Japanese husband Sam on a kibbutz in Israel. ‘I went there to pick oranges. Not from any religious feeling because I had no Jewish or European orientation at all,’ she says, ‘I was brought up as a Kiwi child, remember? The funny thing is that I started seeing him because I was sure there was no future in our relationship, but we’ve been married for twenty-five years!’ And we burst out laughing at the wonderful unpredictability of life.
As Eva and I share our life experiences, we tap a vein of common experiences.
‘Do you feel you’ve made your own choices in life?’ she suddenly asks. She has a refreshingly direct way of speaking about life that cuts through small talk and focuses on what really matters. Reflecting about herself, she says, ‘I never made a fuss when I was growing up. I still don’t make a fuss. I couldn’t cope when my daughter Emma started acting out, but I suppose she was making up for me. I moved around so much from place to place and had so much uncertainty and anxiety in my life, I suppose I was hoping that by fitting in and being good I’d prevent more change.’
This seems a common pattern of behaviour for the children of the Derna. Like Eva I was also a child who made no fuss, hoping that by being docile and invisible, knitting in a corner and causing no trouble, I would protect myself from insecurity and my parents from any further distress.
As her mother never spoke about the voyage, Eva sits forward eagerly to hear what I have discovered. We talk about it all the way back to town and as we say goodbye, she asks, ‘But how are you going to put all those stories together? That’s what I’d like to know!’
32
Oh my giddy aunt!’ Nick Matussevich bursts out when I tell him why I’m calling. He was twelve when he came out on the Derna with his parents and seven siblings, and is so excited about my project that he immediately starts telling me stories about his family, firing my curiosity to fever pitch. As soon as I say that I intend to come to Auckland, true to traditional Russian hospitality, he invites me to stay at his home even though we’ve never met.
A number of passengers had mentioned the large Russian family on the ship. Elsie Pataky told me that there were eight children but by the time we reached Melbourne, the mother was pregnant again. Emil Kopel, one of the orphans in Dr Frant’s group, reminisced about his shipboard romance with one of the daughters, the fetching Nina who wore her blonde hair braided on top of her head. Several months after our arrival, Emil was amazed to receive a telegram from Nina in New Zealand asking, with that flirtatious charm of hers, whether he was still interested or not. It sounded like a fascinating family but no one knew their surname.
Looking through the passenger list, I noticed a big family call
ed Matussevich with first names that might have come straight out of a novel by Tolstoy. Since Emil had received the letter from New Zealand, I looked up the Auckland telephone directory and to my delight I found Nick.
When the Matussevich clan turned up at the flying boat base in Sydney on 6 November 1948, the booking clerk at Tasman Airways explained that there weren’t enough vacant seats on the seaplane to accommodate them all. But when he suggested that they could travel to Auckland separately, Vasily Matussevich wouldn’t hear of it. ‘The family has stayed together all this time and we’re not going to be split up now,’ he declared. It was an ironic statement because within a short time his family would be broken up in a more tragic and irrevocable way than he could possibly have imagined.
When they all arrived together in Auckland one week later on 14 November 1948, they were met by representatives of the Red Cross and by a press photographer from the New Zealand Herald. The following day, when the readers opened the newspaper, they saw the whole Matussevich family. The striking mother, her smooth black hair parted in the centre above her straight eyebrows, wore short white socks and white sandshoes just like her daughters with their braided hair. In the front row stood Nick, a cheeky grin on his impish face. At the back, only his stern face showing, was their father, Vasily Matussevich.
All over the city, flags fluttered from mastheads and coloured bunting was draped over city shopfronts. ‘After the reception we got at the airport, we thought that the flags were there to welcome us, but later we found out it was to celebrate the birth of Prince Charles!’ Nick laughs.
I’m talking to him in his homely cottage at Beachhaven where every shelf, wall and surface is covered with souvenirs from past holidays, family photographs and assorted memorabilia. Nick has lost a few teeth over the years and his hair has turned white and receded from his high forehead, but when he laughs, his full mouth curls up in a disarming, puckish smile and I feel I’m looking at the lively tow-haired twelve year old he was on the Derna.
It rained the day they arrived in Auckland, and they spent the afternoon at the Civic Theatre in Queen Street to see the appropriately named movie, Singin’ in the Rain. The three boys spent that night with their father at the YMCA in Wellesley Street, while the girls and their mother slept at the YWCA in Queen Street. The following day they caught the train to Tangawhahine to stay with their grandfather, whom the children had never met.
While they were still living at the DP camp in Austria, Olga Matussevich had discovered through the Red Cross that her father, Paul Gerabine, was living in New Zealand’s North Island where he owned a farm. He had migrated there in the 1920s when the government enticed farmers with offers of 200 acres on a ninety-nine-year lease. With the assistance of the Red Cross, Olga’s father brought his daughter and her family out to join him.
The Matusseviches were among the 5000 refugees accepted by New Zealand after the war. In 1945, a Dominion Population Committee had considered ways of increasing the country’s population, which was then under two million. The government’s policy was to restrict the number of displaced persons, while assisting British migrants, so that New Zealand would remain predominantly British.
The children had heard about their grandfather’s farm and couldn’t wait to ride the horses. Paul Gerabine was a resourceful man who wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. After fleeing from Russia, where he had been a diplomat in the time of the Romanovs, he opened an antique shop in London and later manufactured sweets. In New Zealand he cleared the property himself. It consisted mainly of low-lying land which turned into swamp when it rained, but the run-off from a hilly area enabled him to create a waterhole from which he obtained fresh water for the homestead he had built.
Nick gives a short laugh. ‘I did get to ride a horse on Grandfather’s property, but it was a draught horse, not the sleek thoroughbred I’d hoped for. We actually spent more time milking cows than riding horses. Grandfather ran a military-type operation and recorded everything meticulously in his notebook. What he bought, how much he paid, when a cow calved, which one was sold and for how much.’
Paul Gerabine was a big, broad-shouldered man with an erect bearing who didn’t take any nonsense. Compared with him, Nick thought his strict parents seemed almost easy-going. ‘But we weren’t there very long, maybe only a week or two, because an argument blew up between my mother and him,’ Nick recalls. ‘She stormed off and said she didn’t want to see him again as long as she lived. And she never did. When he died, she didn’t go to his funeral.’
Many years passed before Nick found out why his mother had been mortally offended. When she was dying she told him that the argument had been about her own mother, who had stayed in Russia when her father left. By the time the Matussevich family arrived in New Zealand, Paul Gerabine had another family.
‘When Mum asked him why he hadn’t brought her mother out to New Zealand, he said she could have lived with him as his housekeeper. That’s what made Mum so mad,’ Nick explains. ‘That created an argument with Dad, because he told her she should respect her father no matter what he said. Dad was very traditional in the way he treated women. Whenever they had friends over, he’d always insist on the men eating first and the women and children afterwards. I don’t hold with that. My family all eat together,’ he says and points to the photos of his four daughters on the wall. He’s given them all Russian names: Maria Beryl, Helen Olga, Gail Galina and Tamara Dunya.
Shuffling over to the sideboard in his well-worn slippers, Nick brings me a photograph of a raven-haired young woman outside her parents’ villa in St Petersburg before the Russian Revolution. Olga Matussevich’s smooth hair is parted in the centre and pulled back severely from a striking face with arrow-straight black eyebrows, high cheekbones and a melancholy gaze. I can imagine her, haughty and remote, strolling around the estate with the borzoi hounds, or galloping over the steppes, her fur-trimmed cloak flying behind her. Hers is a haunting face that reminds me of Chekhov’s wistful heroines, and I can understand why Vasily Matussevich couldn’t get her out of his mind from the moment they met. Already at sixteen she had an air of lingering sadness, as if she had a presentiment of what life had in store.
Although she had resolved to have nothing more to do with her father, she told the children that he was their grandfather and that if he invited them, they should visit him. ‘Sometimes I would bicycle over to the farm in the school holidays,’ Nick recalls. ‘I liked the old man but I don’t recall ever seeing a smile on his face. After we moved to Dargaville, though, we lost touch.’
By the time Olga and Vasily’s last child, Tanya, was born in July 1949, the family had moved north to Dargaville. To earn some money, their father went share-cropping and share-milking in Hikurangi, and later scrub-cutting at Kerakopeni. Unable to speak English, he was willing to tackle any physical work and knocked on farmhouse doors looking for fences to mend or scrub to clear. Nick often worked with his father, cutting down ti-tree to clear the land so the farmers could plant grass for pasture. It was pleasant working in the fresh air, and when they piled the wood and made big bonfires, the smell of eucalyptus in the air made them inhale deeply and close their eyes with pleasure. I can almost smell it myself as he describes it.
‘We were scrub-cutting at Kerakopeni when it happened,’ Nick says and the smile has gone from his cheerful face. ‘It was a miserable wet Sunday morning when those two guys from the fish shop in town came to the farm. Ever since then, wet mornings have depressed me and still do to this day. “I’m sorry, Missus, but your son is no more,” one of the men said. It was an odd way of putting it, but what’s how it came out. They said something about a fishing accident.’
It took a long time for it to sink in that Olga’s second son Alex, the mischievous one who made up for his short stature with high spirits, always skylarking and joking, the apple of her eye, was dead at fifteen. Distraught, she kept screaming those terrible words over and over again: ‘Your son is no more! Your son is no more!’
Alex’s death came at the end of a chain of events that had begun with Basil’s accident, and that, according to Nick, had started with his own adolescent prank. ‘I’d been watching through the window at my aunty getting dressed to go to a dance when my brother Basil caught me and clipped me across the ear for being a Peeping Tom. He was the serious one in the family. We started fighting but when Dad went after him, Basil climbed a tree so Dad wouldn’t give him a hiding. While he was up there he fell and injured his back so badly that he had to go to hospital,’ Nick says. ‘So my prank backfired on me. If I hadn’t been a Peeping Tom none of those terrible things would have happened, but I can’t change the past. I have to live with it.’
Nick’s prank was to have far-reaching repercussions. Basil had been working in the local fish shop, and after his accident he talked his brother Alex into replacing him until he was able to return to work. Alex was at high school at the time but was given permission to leave before the end of the school year because the family needed the income.
When the owners of the fish shop offered Alex one pound to go fishing with them in Whangarei Harbour one evening, he agreed. But the sea was rough that night and while the two men were below, either asleep or playing cards, Alex stayed up on deck alone. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death: Alex had become sea-sick, had vomited and choked. There was some talk of an epileptic fit, but as he had never had one before, that did not seem probable.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 39
