The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  White-faced and swaying on her feet, Olga Matussevich saw her beloved son’s body laid out in the morgue, his clothes sodden with seawater.

  ‘She never believed those two men and always suspected there was more to the story than they told her,’ Nick says. ‘She cursed them and put a hex on their families.’

  The way things turned out, however, someone must have put a hex on the Matussevich family. Basil had initially been sent to the local hospital but when he developed bed sores requiring skin grafts, they transferred him to Auckland. He had just started walking gingerly on crutches, and spoke of becoming engaged to a nurse at the hospital, when he slipped and injured his back again. It was about this time that he found out what had happened to Alex.

  The chain of events that linked Alex and Basil was to have an even more tragic outcome. Sensitive and withdrawn by nature, Basil blamed himself for his brother’s death. If he hadn’t asked Alex to stand in for him at the fish shop, he would still be alive. According to Nick, Alex was depressed by the prospect of more surgery on his back, brooded about the accident and felt he had let the family down. At the age of twenty Basil decided that living was too painful. He tied the sheets together and hanged himself.

  ‘We survived the war and the bombing of Berlin, came to this peaceful country and within two months my parents had lost two sons and I’d lost both my brothers,’ Nick sighs. ‘Mother went crackers when she heard that Basil had hung himself in hospital. The eldest son is the kingpin in a Russian family. I don’t think Mum and Dad ever recovered from the deaths of my brothers. They became bitter about New Zealand, blamed the country for the tragedies and wished they’d never come. Gradually the wounds healed, but the pain never went away. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mother had given up on life, withered and died.’

  But Olga Matussevich was as resilient as the slender birch trees of her native land that bend in storms but do not break. Her face became more melancholy as she continued to devote herself to her family. Every year on Alex’s birthday she would take down his toy plane from the top of a cupboard, wind up the motor and watch it circle around the room.

  With the help of a Yugoslav friend who lent them the money for a deposit, the Matusseviches bought a tumbledown cottage in the quiet rural community at Awakino Point, three kilometres out of Dargaville, where they kept chickens. Vasily worked at Portland Cement Works through the week and on weekends he became the barman at the Northern Wairoa Hotel in Dargaville, where Nina worked at the telephone exchange. It was probably from there that she sent the telegram to her shipboard sweetheart Emil Kopel in Melbourne.

  Olga, who began her privileged life in an aristocratic mansion with servants in St Petersburg and cantered around her parents’ estate on an Arab pony given to her by the Shah of Persia, made the best of life in this sleepy country town at the other end of the world. She spent her time sewing and knitting clothes for her daughters and cooking the Russian dishes they loved. She made her own butter because, like most Europeans, she preferred it unsalted, and baked yeast cakes filled with cream cheese, raisins, poppyseed, honey and hazelnuts. The vision of their mother with flour all over her hands stayed with her children all their lives. At Christmas, she would bake the traditional Russian plaited bun with almonds and raisins, while their father bought them generous presents which, according to Nick, took him most of the year to pay off.

  Although Nick did well at school and was awarded the school cup for English, he was always in trouble. ‘Us boys were always skylarking,’ he grins. ‘There were lots of fights at school because when the other boys found out we were Russian, they started calling out “Bloody commies!” and I’d yell back, “Don’t you dare call me a commie!” Sometimes I got the cane from the headmaster because I argued with my fists!’

  As in Australia, there was widespread fear of Communists and ‘pinkos’ in New Zealand. Anti-Communist paranoia was fuelled by a growing number of strikes. Things came to a head in 1951 when there was violence on the wharves. The government declared a state of emergency from February to July and sent in the troops to load cargo. As Nick discovered, any mention of Russia or Russians provoked jeers and accusations.

  Although he was always in the top half of the class, Nick didn’t like school and left as soon as possible to become a share-milker’s assistant. Occasionally he repaired fences. As he grew older, conflict with his father increased. Always strict and watchful, Vasily Matussevich had become even more protective of Nick, who was now his only son.

  ‘Dad was always checking on me: when I was coming home, what I was doing, who with and why. I had to answer to him all the time. If he didn’t like what I said or did, he’d belt me.’ As we sit in the cosy kitchen sipping scalding tea from our mugs, Nick is pensive. ‘Dad was very strict, but looking back on it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  His wife Beryl puts her head around the door, but disappears again, not wanting to disturb our conversation. When I ask how they met, he launches into the story with obvious enjoyment. ‘One evening when I was going to the pictures, I “borrowed” a bike I saw in a garage, intending to return it. Next morning, I cleaned it up but just as I was putting it back the owner grabbed me. He called the constable who took me home and Dad gave me a hiding. Not long after that I met a girl at the skating rink in Auckland and we started going out. When she took me to meet her father, I nearly died of shock. It was the garage owner!’ Nick shakes with laughter and Beryl, who has been standing in the hallway, laughs too.

  ‘Dad was disappointed in me when I married Beryl in 1962 because he wanted me to marry a Russian girl,’ Nick recalls. ‘He said I’d let myself down. When we started having a family I got naturalised for the sake of the children, but he didn’t like that either. He never got naturalised. “Oh, so you sold yourself!” he said. “How could I sell myself?” I said to him. “You brought me out here. I came with nothing and I’ve got nothing to sell!” He was also upset that I had four daughters and no sons, because that meant our name would die out. Dad never saw his native land from the time he left at sixteen, yet he stayed intensely Russian and Tsarist until the day he died. As it turned out, not one of us married a Russian.’

  Nick tried a variety of jobs. ‘Through my own stupidity I left school early and became a self-taught man, but I always liked doing things my own way,’ he says. After two years in the processing plant of the Colonial Sugar Works, he worked as a storeman on the wharves. ‘Jobs were so plentiful in those days you never had to worry, not like now,’ he says. His next job was processing lead into sound-proofing at Dominion Lead Mills in Newmarket, where he melted lead ingots in heat that was over 700 degrees without a mask. Later they would pour the molten metal into huge moulds to make sheet lead for x-rays, sound-proofing, roofing and solder wire. ‘It was worse than the engine room of the Derna !’ he says. ‘The red lead comes to the surface as fine dust and gets into your bloodstream.’

  In time, Nick developed lead poisoning. ‘I only found out about it when I went to donate blood at Auckland Hospital. “When was the last time you had a lead test done?” the nurse asked when I told her where I worked. I had no idea what she was talking about. I never knew I was supposed to have blood tests. Anyway it turned out I had over ten percent lead content in my blood instead of two percent. I felt lethargic, my bones ached like toothache and I was sleepy. They said if it rose to eleven percent I’d have to go into hospital. I had to drink a lot of water and stay away from work for three months. After that the level came down to four percent, but I had a family to support so they let me go back to work on condition that I kept a mask on and drank a pint of milk a day.’

  After thirty years at the plant, Nick obtained a better job at an electronics firm but he didn’t leave until he’d given proper notice. ‘Be loyal to your company, don’t take time off and don’t abuse privileges—those are the principles my father drummed into me.’ He gives a mischievous grin. ‘But I have a spiteful streak. When the boss wouldn’t come and have a drink with me at
the farewell party after I’d spent thirty years working there, I took sandpaper and methylated spirits and removed all the markings I’d made on my machine, so the next guy wouldn’t be able to use it!’

  These days Nick still works as a storeman for the same electronics firm but at nights he cleans offices. ‘It’s hard to exist in New Zealand these days on one wage,’ he says. ‘My daughter Tammy moved to Sydney because she couldn’t find work here.’

  While Nick was processing lead, his father Vasily was working for Portland Cement, and later worked at a factory making salad oil. ‘Language was Dad’s problem,’ Nick muses. ‘He had the brains but never learned English properly. He was too dogmatic, drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney. When he had heart problems, the specialist gave him some medication but one day he just threw the tablets across the room and said he wasn’t taking any more. Mum told him he was being foolish. That’s when she started asserting herself. After all the years he’d been rough with her, she was getting her own back. Eventually Dad decided he would take the medicine, but it was too late by then. He died of emphysema in 1981, when he was seventy-nine. He had a hard life. For all his faults, I don’t think I’d have liked Dad to be any other way.’

  Five years later, the high-spirited Nina, who was everyone’s favourite, died of leukaemia at the age of fifty-four. ‘I’ve never seen such a transformation in a person from one week to the next,’ Nick recalls. ‘One Saturday I went to see her in hospital and she was talking and joking as usual, and the week after she was staring at the ceiling, no life in her at all, and a nurse was swabbing her mouth.’ His voice becomes husky. ‘I keep close to my sisters now.’

  The following year, in 1987, his mother died of abdominal cancer at eighty-one. She had outlived three sons, but after Nina’s death she seemed to lose the will to live. Her eldest daughter, Olga Brock, nursed her at home until the end.

  Olga Brock still lives in the house that she and her late husband Bert built at Greenhithe forty-five years ago. It was sparsely populated then, with a few simple farmhouses, but today this is a thriving area of orchards and nurseries, increasingly sought-after by city dwellers who erect villas on the land.

  Olga’s lime-green cottage stands in a large garden of tall trees. When my taxi pulls up around the side of the house, she looks out of the back door, sees me getting out but goes quickly back inside and waits for me to go to the front door. Inside the house, birds chirp in a cage, posters of animals are stuck on the walls and memorabilia, papers and souvenirs are piled on couches and on the floor. Olga, in a neat print dress, has greying hair around a Slav face and a wary manner. Although she opens up while reminiscing about the voyage, as soon as I ask about her parents, she becomes tight-lipped. She can’t understand why anyone would want to know about their lives and regards my questions as intrusive. From her reluctance to talk about her parents, I sense that she has inherited their mistrust of outsiders and the conviction that family matters should never be discussed outside the family circle. She seems fiercely loyal to her parents, determined to protect their privacy and guard their secrets.

  With the inheritance he received after his parents died, Nick took his first overseas trip in 1988 and visited the Soviet Union. While in Leningrad, he discovered that his grandmother had died in 1941 during the Siege of Leningrad and was buried in one of the mass graves where thousands of dead bodies were found entwined after the frost had thawed. ‘That visit made me realise that I belong to both countries,’ he says. ‘My roots are in the Soviet Union but my heart will always be in New Zealand.’

  There are forty-nine members of the Matussevich clan today. ‘When I look at my grandchildren today,’ Nick reflects, ‘I’d rather have what we had, than the way things are now. Values today are shot to pieces. We had more respect. If I had the chance of starting a family all over again, I don’t know if I’d have a family.’

  One windy spring morning in the year 2000, around the fifty-second anniversary of their arrival in New Zealand, Nick made a pilgrimage to Dargaville with his sisters Olga, Veronica and Anastasia. At Tangawhahine, their grandfather’s homestead was still standing near the road leading to the railway line, which has been named Gerabine Road after him. Not far away, in the peaceful country cemetery where their grandfather and brothers lie buried, they pulled up the weeds and cleaned the tombstones while rabbits scampered around them and pheasants pecked the grass seeds. ‘While tidying the graves, we talked to Basil and Alex and told them all about our lives,’ Nick says. ‘It felt as if they were very close to us.’

  33

  Harold Kapp hobbles out to the gate of his flat-roofed home in the Auckland suburb of Sandringham to greet me. ‘I built this house myself in the fifties and made the garden,’ he says in a strong Estonian accent. Beside the path are the rose beds which he has covered with wire meshing to stop the cat next door from digging them up.

  Ushering me inside, Harold takes me on a tour of the house, pointing out the solid rimu archetraves, the mahogany table and chairs, and the sturdy sideboard he made with his own hands. There’s a vase of fresh flowers in the bedroom. He has placed flowers beside his wife’s bed every morning for the past five years, ever since she died. When he opens a drawer to show me the shirts and sweaters and singlets folded crisp-edged like exclusive merchandise in a designer boutique, I notice that two fingers on his right hand are missing. The result of an accident at work, he explains.

  He’s so pleased that I’ve come, he doesn’t know what to do for me, and offers me a glass of wine although it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. In the garden where rows of neatly planted flowers are soaking up the winter sunshine, he picks several feijoas and cuts one up for me, urging me to taste it. Its perfumed sweetness simultaneously attracts and repels me.

  One year after his wife died, Harold had a knee replacement. He shows me his reconstructed knee, marvelling how the surgeon scraped away the bone and replaced it with a cap of nylon mesh and stainless steel. Ever since then he has kept to a very strict regime to avoid gaining weight.

  ‘You must be very disciplined,’ I comment.

  ‘Oh yes!’ he exclaims with a laugh. ‘I have been in three military units! Estonian army for nine months, the Red army for one year and then in the Wehrmacht.’

  Puffing because he is short of breath, he explains that he was wounded while fighting the Russians. ‘I was sent to Narva with the Estonian division of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen SS. When the front retreated, I was wounded on 24 July 1944.’ To illustrate, he pulls up his right trouser leg and shows me the holes in his calf. ‘From shrapnel at Narva,’ he says. They operated on him in the military hospital but he lost so much blood that they didn’t expect him to survive and took him straight to the morgue, where he hovered between life and death for three days. ‘But I didn’t worry whether I’d survive or not,’ he shrugs. ‘It didn’t matter at all. Whatever is coming, is coming. Like now. I’m an old man, eighty-two. If I die, I die. I have always been like that.’

  When the war was over, Harold and some of his fellow soldiers tried to escape from the Russian zone. They travelled by night and hid by day so the Russians wouldn’t see their Wehrmacht uniforms. Eventually he reached the American zone at Regensburg, where he found a job serving coffee to the American convoys.

  After marrying Alide, an Estonian dressmaker, Harold realised that with his war record it would be dangerous to return to Estonia, so they decided to migrate to New Zealand where an old uncle of his had migrated during the 1920s. On board the Derna they befriended Elisabeth Meder and her son Lars, and the Maulics family, all of whom were going to New Zealand. Some years later, Harold Kapp and Lidija Maulics founded the Baltic Club in Auckland. Mrs Maulics, who had been a university lecturer in Latvia, was quoted in the Argus when the Derna docked in Melbourne, complaining about the number of Jews and Communists on board.

  As we reminisce about the voyage, Harold leans forward. ‘You know, there were a lot of young Jews on board—mostly Hungarian boys. They di
d make a lot of mess there.’ He shakes his head in disapproval. ‘They damaged the toilets, tore off the seats, broke the doors.’ Knowing about the loose hinges, ill-fitting doors and shoddy plumbing in the washrooms when we left Marseilles, I’m wondering why he is blaming the orphans for their terrible state, when he adds in a conspiratorial tone, ‘Those boys had concentration camp numbers on their arms but they were never in a concentration camp!’

  With Fred Silberstein’s tattooed arm still vivid in my mind, I find Harold’s comment chilling. When I ask what makes him say that, he makes a dismissive motion with his maimed hand. ‘People talked about it on the ship,’ he replies with a finality that makes further discussion futile.

  Ever since I began talking to the Baltic passengers, I had attempted to put aside my own preconceived ideas about their alliance with the Nazis. Gradually I had understood that as a result of their domination and repression by the Russians, they feared the Bolsheviks much as the Jews feared the Nazis. I could even accept that it was a marriage of convenience rather than a love match, and that they had slept with the Germans out of self-protection, not out of sympathy with their anti-Semitic policy.

  But now, hearing someone who had fought with the Wehrmacht maligning the survivors of Nazi concentration camps stretches my tolerance almost to breaking point. I feel angry and choked up, and saddened too, because I realise that no matter what I say, I will not convince him. We hold onto the beliefs that support our perception of the world and our place in it, and facts are powerless against prejudice.

  When Alide and Harold arrived in Auckland, it was an old-fashioned city of 280,000 people, most of whom lived in brick bungalows. What was called ‘the city’ consisted of a grid where few buildings rose higher than two storeys. Although the war had ended three years earlier, some foodstuffs as well as petrol were still rationed, and coupons were needed for meat and butter because much of New Zealand’s butter and lamb was being sent to England, which created local shortages.