Jewels and Ashes by Arnold Zable Read Free Book Online

which he had stored a number of documents. He extracted a manilla envelope which he had labelled, “Sentimental”. ‘Beware of sentimentality’, the old man has often warned me. He maintains a tight rein on his feelings, and reveals them only when pressured. ‘That is why I have lived so long’, he claims.
    Within the larger envelope there is a smaller one, postmarked in Russian, dated May 25, 1926. The letter is short, written in pencil on both sides of a single sheet of unlined paper. Scrawled in Yiddish, it is far softer in tone than I had imagined from stories about Zachariah. He informs Sheine that her grandchildren often think of the babushka who had recently visited them:
    At the dinner table there are disputes over the utensils you left behind. Vladimir has appropriated babushka’s spoon, but the knife and fork have been put aside for Ilyich. The plate however, they have to share. In this way their babushka is with us at every meal.
    This was one of the last letters between the two households. It had become apparent that they were being intercepted on both sides of the border. Police agents raided the Zabludowski home in Bialystok and searched for incriminating documents. Father was detained overnight at police headquarters, interrogated, and accused of having links with the Bolsheviks. Letters from Leningrad were cited as evidence. On Zachariah’s part it was increasingly dangerous to write to Bialystok, for fear of being accused of having connections with ‘reactionaries’ and ‘foreign spies’. Correspondence ceased. Nothing has been heard of Zachariah or his family since.
    All afternoon newly married couples arrive in Red Square with their wedding entourages, to lay wreaths at Lenin’s mausoleum and to be photographed against St Basil’s Cathedral or the Kremlin. Groups of schoolchildren in navy-blue skirts and trousers, white shirts, and red neckties tour the square, their teachers fussing over them. Muscovites approach me in the streets to whisper, ‘Have you anything for sale?’ They are hungry for perfume, a copy of Vogue or Playboy , American cigarettes, a pair of blue jeans — any forbidden fruit. Long queues snake from shops and restaurants. People wait stoically, resigned, with an occasional flicker of discontent. In the subways thousands of fatigued commuters sway against each other in crowded carriages. The dominant expression seems to be an ironic smile.
    It can be felt at the edges, a faint breeze, a patient expectation; something is stirring in Moscow, in the summer of 1986. Yet the city remains at arm’s length, not quite accessible, a veil between me and the descendants of Uncle Zachariah. After all, I am in transit for just two days. My mind is on other destinations and a time far removed, when an ancestor arrived with the theatrical troupe Sniegov and Dubrolov to tour the provinces proclaiming the birth of a new order; and on a continent far distant, where under a bed there lies a frayed letter detailing the means of the distribution of grandmother Sheine’s cutlery and plate between two children called Vladimir and Ilyich.
    â€˜Beware of sentimentality’, the old man has often warned. ‘That is why I have lived so long.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    A TRAIN MOVES across the Soviet-Polish border. Flat fields extend to the edge of a flat universe. Haystacks criss-cross rectangular fields. Isolated homesteads shelter under clusters of pine: solid mansions that exude a sense of solitude, and thatched cottages that hint at warmth and intimacy. A car moves just below the horizon harmonising with the movement of the train. The Bialystoku region extends north for several hundred kilometres. A summer Sunday welcomes me quietly to the land of ancestral presences.
    The train pulls into a provincial station. Booths aflame with bunches of flowers line the platforms. Customers make their last-moment purchases which they present, soon