Dobryd (3 page)

In this way the days passed, outwardly monotonous and alike. But inside myself I treasured the greatest of secrets. I had discovered a world beyond fear. I had also discovered my own being, just as another child might in his own house come upon a magnificent new toy whose existence he had never suspected.

V

Two months later, the Russians were ready to advance. We were told to prepare to leave the village.

An army doctor came to see us towards the end of our stay. We were all examined. The news of my recovery was very good. The coughing had stopped, the lesions in my lungs were healing, and bones that had been twisted were growing straight. Everyone watched as the doctor made his diagnosis.

The old woman Marisia was there too. She crossed herself when the doctor spoke, and repeated “Thank God for this miracle” as a form of punctuation to his sentences.

He laughed at her. “No, old woman, your God had nothing to do with this. We all did it together. One day she will make us proud.” He put an arm around me. “This child will grow up to do great things. Remember, I said so.”

Every face smiled at me. I felt very fortunate. It seemed to me then that there
was
something special about my life. I readily accepted the doctor's prophecy. With time it became a family theme. It was only when I grew up that I felt the full weight of the burden I had accepted so easily.

The Russian soldiers who came to see us were delighted with the change they saw. I had become their pet. They vied with each other in bringing me treats, in playing with me, and in making me laugh. They were all as proud of me as parents, but I had my favourite among them, Yuri, who had protected me the first day in the barn. When the time came to leave the village, I had no regrets. Yuri was going with us.

We set out early one morning. This time we were travelling with the soldiers in an army truck. The other survivors had left earlier with a convoy going in another direction. We were the only ones who wanted to return to Dobryd.

At last I was part of the noise and the laughter I had listened to with such wonder two months ago. So much had happened since then. We were about to resume the journey that began the day we left our loft. Yet now everything seemed different. In my mind the two were separated by a lifetime of change.

Djunek, Marisia and Kazia accompanied me to the truck. The old man gave us a bag of food for the trip, and the women cried. When the time came to say good-bye, their sobs and shouts of grief became more intense. “
Pant, pant
,” they cried as they clutched at my mother and my aunt. “Tell the Russians how we helped you. Don't forget us in the city.”

My mother and my aunt, for all their suspicions, could not resist the mood of that morning. Even earlier in fact, towards the end of our stay, I had sensed a change in their attitude. These were after all the first people, after the soldiers, to treat us like human beings. Now they embraced us with feeling and promised to write. If any more proof were needed, this confirmed to all of us that fate had at last tipped its balance in our favour.

On the road, the village and farmhouse were quickly forgotten. The soldiers were eager to return to the front after their long rest. During this trip they were elated and full of confidence. While they joked and laughed together, my mother and my aunt sat tense and silent. I knew little of the fears and memories that preoccupied them as we travelled towards Dobryd. But I felt their tension and anxiety, and it affected me. Hope and dread mingled in my heart as I thought of our destination.

Yuri sat beside us. Like us, he felt the significance of this journey. To help the time pass he began to tell stories of the battles he had fought. Each one of the medals that he wore with such pride on his ragged uniform represented an incident of great courage. All his stories were simple, heroic tales of Russian daring. He told of the cowardice of the Germans who always became powerless in the end, faced with the courage of the Soviets. He told of the bravery and sacrifice of the Russian people, of their unsurpassable strength when their actions were directed by a common goal.

Throughout his narrative there was a message of confidence: we had all suffered and struggled but now the bad times were over. Now it was our turn to live in freedom and be happy. I had learned enough Russian in the last two months to understand the promise of Yuri's story. I believed it with all my heart. Much of it had already been fulfilled during the first weeks of freedom. Now that I was strong, I wanted to be as brave as Yuri and his comrades.

Two of his companions were women. It was the voice of one of them I had heard singing a familiar song the day we were liberated. Since then I had played with them many times. They were both young and cheerful, and very fond of playing tricks on the others. They seemed more like school girls than soldiers. Yet in battle, Yuri had assured us, they were often among the bravest in their unit. I looked at these girls as I listened to Yuri's stories and I promised myself that I would grow up like them—strong and unafraid. Ready to fight for a world where people lived free and happy.

A few hours later we entered the town. I knew immediately that something was not right. What I saw did not fit in with the glorious schemes Yuri had just drawn for our future.

In the morning we had left a village untouched by war. Now, a few hours later, we were driving through a town that was almost levelled. The village and the town seemed worlds apart.

Everywhere we looked we saw only ruins. Not one building appeared to be intact. Fires smouldered. Smoke hung in the air. We seemed to have arrived just at the end of some final battle.

The soldiers were as affected as the rest of us. For the first time I saw fear in their faces. Their rifles were raised and their eyes scanned the bombed-out buildings and the remaining rooftops. We met no resistance. In fact, it seemed we were the only ones alive in the town. People had either fled or remained trapped beneath the ruins which became their tombs. It was hard to imagine there had ever been any life here.

My mother and my aunt watched this spectacle as silently as the others. Occasionally, a hand would tremble or a shudder go through them when we passed the ruins of some familiar landmark. There was no longer any thought of finding their family home.

Their long ordeal was over but a new one was about to begin. Their hope of returning home died at the sight of the ruins. They were now truly homeless, condemned to live out the rest of their lives in a state of exile.

VI

“You can't stay in the town without our protection,” Yuri was trying to explain to my mother. “There's nowhere you can go right now. You must come with us to the army camp. In a few days we'll clear away some of this mess and we'll find you a place to stay. Believe me, it looks worse than it is. I know. We've come into towns like this before, and in no time the place is rebuilt and bustling with life. You'll see, it will be the same here.”

Yuri's face revealed the pain he felt as he spoke. It did not fit his words of optimism. It seemed almost comical to me to see him downcast like this. Was it a game, I wondered. Would he break into his usual smile in a minute and tease me about being fooled? I looked at his friends but their faces were also grim and closed. I withdrew further into our corner.

Now and then I heard Yuri curse to himself, softly, and his expression changed then from pain to anger. Again he turned to my mother and my aunt. It wasn't the destruction itself which upset him, he explained. He had seen little else in the last months of war. What angered him was that he and his comrades could not spare us this last blow.

“We'll build another Dobryd here. Finer than anything the Germans destroyed. We'll start from scratch. Everything will be new, modern. You'll see—we know how to build in Russia. We'll build a new town for a new kind of life. Yes, today is a sad day for you. But in six months, I promise you, we'll all be working so hard rebuilding this town that no one will have time to grieve.”

If my mother and my aunt heard him, they gave no sign. They remained impassive, like the ruins about us. They were beyond words, beyond sympathy, cut off from other people's feelings by the darkness of their own.

We reached the army camp in the late afternoon. Yuri helped us out of the truck and we followed him inside. There we saw a large room with cots and blankets covering the floor space. The room was filled with people, other civilians, refugees like us who had nowhere to go.

People squeezed themselves together and somehow a corner was made for us. We were given straw mattresses. Someone brought us food and blankets. All the attention of the room was focused on us. After a few minutes some people came over to greet my mother and my aunt, but they received no response. They soon withdrew and after a while everyone left us alone.

In the days that followed the soldiers did their best to make us feel comfortable and welcome. They shared what they had and tried very hard to cheer everyone up. In the evening, one of them was always ready with a harmonica or a story. We were given daily bulletins on the progress of the war, and the victories of the Soviets were told in every detail.

My mother and my aunt took no part in this. They ate when food was brought, and they no longer cried, but they spoke to no one. Even the soldiers, all except Yuri, left them alone. Something about their withdrawal into grief made all attempts at consolation seem grotesque.

The grim foreboding of their entry into Dobryd was confirmed in the next few days. Most of their family was dead—parents, sisters, a brother, nieces, nephews and my father. Several people in the camp had witnessed his death.

At that time the news of his death meant nothing to me. We had been separated when I was just over two years old. I couldn't remember him at all. My mother had tried very hard to keep him alive for me, but I became uneasy whenever she spoke of him. I think it was because she herself could not speak of him without becoming very upset. My father had been her first love, the only one who had mattered. After the war there were other men, even one whom she married, yet throughout her life she continued to mourn for him, to talk of him, especially to me, his only child.

There were many stories, I remember, to illustrate his intelligence, his kindness, his love for her and for me. By the time I was an adolescent I had heard them all endless times. Her words became part of a family ritual, and I responded to them automatically, not listening, and without feeling. It was only when I grew up and left home that I thought of him as a real person. Someone who had actually lived. A man who had loved his wife, his child, his work. A man who had suffered, and died so young, at the age of thirty.

Nothing of him survived. For a long time there wasn't even a photograph to show me what he had looked like. We never found out what had happened to his body, so there was no grave to visit, just a vague memory I wasn't even sure was my own. Perhaps it came from one of my mother's stories. A man's face close to mine. A certain game we played. Bits and fragments, meaningless without the background that had been destroyed forever.

As an adult I finally did get to see a picture of him. I was visiting a distant cousin of his who lived in New York. We talked of my family, and I told her that I had often wondered about my father and regretted that no photographs of him had survived. She looked at me, surprised. “But I have some. I suppose I should have sent them to you long ago. But you know I never realized until this moment that you had no souvenir of him.”

She returned with an old album. In the first photograph we found of my father he was shown with some university friends. They were on bicycles, with knapsacks on their backs, heading down a country road. In the next photograph he was playing chess with a friend, his face in profile as he concentrated on the game. There was one more picture, larger than the other two, and obviously more professional. He and my mother, on their wedding trip, posed for the camera in St. Mark's Square in Venice while pigeons settled around them. My mother and my father looked incredibly young, happy, her arm through his, their hands clasped.

I asked my cousin if I could keep the photographs. Later that night, back in my hotel room, I spread them out before me and stared at them for a long time. I tried to connect these images with those already embedded in my mind. But it was no good. Too many of the connecting links were gone, destroyed forever. Then I cried, from fatigue and frustration. I cried for the young man in these pictures, and also for myself because I had never known him. I suppose that night, so many years after that day in camp when I had learned of his death, I finally mourned for my father.

The only happy event during those first weeks in Dobryd was the return of my father's brother, still in his Russian army uniform. But when we were reunited I did not think of it as a joyful occasion. Somehow in my mind my uncle's return became associated with the state of grief that my aunt and my mother suffered. What was coincidental became for me cause and effect. For a long time I resented his presence.

The weeks in the army camp were very unhappy for me, even worse than the time in the loft. What frightened me most was that my family had forgotten about me. For weeks on end they sat silently together, so lost in their grief that they took no notice of me.

Eventually, however, they became aware of me again. One day I noticed that they were responding to me as they used to, treating me with the attentiveness that I had assumed was my right. Slowly they began to notice the activity around them.

Life in the camp had taken on an intense pitch. The town was being restored. People were rebuilding their lives. My family realized they had to rouse themselves.

Yet there remained some distance between them and the other refugees. Several times I overheard people in the camp telling stories about them. Those who knew the family before the war spoke of my grandfather. Of how he had lived as the largest landowner in the area. They told the others that the family were never like other Jews. There was always something foreign and aloof about them. They were too assimilated, too rich, and they travelled too much.