The Fig Tree (2 page)

I have a well-worn book at home, inscribed ‘To Arnold, wishing you all the best for your tenth birthday, from Auntie Feigl and Uncle Morris.' The book is called
Tales of the Hasidim
. Edited by Martin Buber, it contains hundreds of stories, some a mere three lines in length, others pages long.

The Hasidic movement was founded by the Baal Shem Tov, Master of the Good Name, in the seventeenth century, not so long after a great calamity had befallen his people. Many thousands had been massacred in pogroms that erupted in the villages of the Ukraine. Whole communities were decimated. Those who survived were in a state of shock. It was a time to regroup and be embraced by the community. And a time to gather around the teller of tales.

The Hasidic
rebbes
were master storytellers. They used their parables to help lift their people out of gloom. Their stories were acts of communion that could heal a wounded soul. Their essence was revealed in the moment of telling. The teller entered into his tale, as if possessed. These tales lose much of their power on the page. Nevertheless, I often return to the book and, each time, I learn something new about the art of storytelling.

In
Tales of the Hasidim
there is a story about a rabbi whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov. ‘A story,' he said, ‘must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself. My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that time on he was cured of his lameness. That's the way to tell a story.'

Ultimately, we tell stories because we must. Stories are what make us human. Stories can reveal a forgotten past. Stories can uncover hidden injustices and record the contradictory impulses that drive us. And stories link us to the wisdom of our collective pasts.

But I have ranged too far. Alexander's attention has been lured elsewhere. He is diverted by a sound overhead. He looks up at an infinity of blue and sees an aeroplane. I recall one of the familiar sounds of my own childhood: the neighing of a horse, late at night, weaving in and out of my dreams; the metallic clip-clop of hooves; the rattling and jingling of bottles; and the quick rhythmic steps of a man on the run, interrupted by the creaking of the front door flung wide open. And I could hear the milkman deposit the half-dozen or so bottles by the front door.

It was a comforting sound. It had about it a feeling of orderliness and regularity. It emanated goodwill and seemed to whisper, ‘All is well in the world. While you sleep, little children, you are being well looked after.'

I never once saw the face of the milkman. He always remained a creature of the night, of the pre-dawn hours. All I knew of him was the sound of his deliveries, the footsteps, and the final swing of the gate as he retreated, on the run, back to the milk-cart. Then, like phantoms, the horses moved on, the neighing subsided, the jingling vanished into the distance. And in the morning, as if to prove it was not merely a dream, there stood the bottles, neatly arranged by the front doormat, the glass twinkling with dew, while in the middle of the road lay a trail of horse manure.

For father, this was gold. He would set to work shovelling the manure into a bucket, and he would run with the bucket through the house to the backyard, to his vegetable patch, where he spread the manure under an early morning sun.

My father was a small man, but when I was small he seemed large and miraculous. Father was so big that he could not even fit into the bathtub full length. His arms drooped over the sides. His legs were bent at the knee. He was an awkward giant, perhaps as large as Alexander sees me now, especially since I have him on my shoulders again and we are moving to the far side of the park, to an enclave of trees and shrubs.

He sets out through the undergrowth, feeling his way between branches that touch the ground. He retrieves a stray golf ball, and stares at it. The ball flashes white in the midmorning light; and when he hands it to me I recall my earliest memory. I am at a party, crawling through a forest of legs. Smoke drifts down between the trees.

I come across a crushed white object. I clasp it in my hands, and weave my way through the forest until I find mother. She bends over, lifts me up, and carries me to the kitchen where she performs her feat of magic. She drops the dented ping-pong ball into a kettle of boiling water and, minutes later, it has become smooth, round again, a glowing white sphere.

These are images that are precious to a writer. Images I have used in stories. Images I can use in future works. Magic. Imagination. There are connections. To be a writer, perhaps, is to be in a state of childhood: to see, smell, hear, taste, and touch things in a state of openness; to be in touch with life itself.

We return home for breakfast, which Alexander gulps down with the relish of someone who has done a good morning's work. We drive to Ricketts Point, a bayside beach. The sea is rising from the mists. Sky and water are the same colour, a continuous vista of pale blues. Alexander is splashing through the shallows. He chases a shrieking seagull, and falls over laughing.

We are in a Melbourne suburb and I can take my son to the sea, to a park. Yet when I glance at the pages of a daily newspaper I see the photo of a child, Alexander's age. He sits in the dust of a refugee camp. He lives within a compound, ringed by a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire. His eyes are glazed. He is traumatised. It can be seen on his face. He is one of millions on the move. Uprooted. In search of a place he can call home. This is the world that adults have created. Is life magical for him too?

Alexander is enjoying his birthright as a human being. The world is radiant, and at peace. He is free. This is the way it should be. Even so, he is upset when I take him home and leave for work. He watches in dismay from the front gate as I drive away. He tugs at the pickets in frustration. He cries even though he is in the arms of his mother. The little tragedies are already at work. He cannot have it all. ‘Happiness, sadness, separation, and reunion,' says a Chinese proverb. This is how it is.

When I return home after work he runs out to greet me. He is beaming. It is a clear night. He looks up at a sky pulsating with stars, and laughs. I have come across him often, in the past few months, gazing at a reflection in a window, a bowl of oranges, a ray of sun falling across a sofa. These are unembellished moments. Moments of pure being.

I think of my father, as he was, when I was a child. I do not recall seeing him happy in those years. He seemed preoccupied, anxious. His life had been reduced to the suitcase that he carried to the Victoria Market each day to earn his meagre keep. A tension coursed through the house. My parents were immigrants. They were from a generation that emerged from war. Their families had vanished from the face of the earth. They were struggling to begin their shattered lives anew.

Yet, just as my son has become a teacher, guiding me back to the pure essence of things, so too did my father live long enough to show me that there is a way back to radiance, even in old age. When he retired, at the age of seventy, he seemed depressed, impatient. In time he began to change. He went on long walks through the neighbourhood streets. He planted vegetables, once more, in the backyard. He read the beloved Yiddish writers of his childhood. And he began to write poetry again, in Yiddish, for the first time in almost fifty years.

One of his poems, ‘Meditation on Fire', evoked another childhood memory of mine. Every winter, father would part the makeshift curtains that covered the wood stove in the kitchen of our Carlton house. We would sit in front of the stove, roast potatoes in the embers, and watch the flames vault over the kitchen walls.

Just months after he retired, father rekindled the flame for the first time in many winters; the flames seemed to spark his creative impulse. They drew him out of himself. He began to focus, once again, on the world around him, to see it as he had seen it in his childhood, on the other side of the globe, in the fields and forests of White Russia.

I visited him one autumn morning and found that he was not in the house. Instead I saw his latest poem, freshly written, lying upon his desk. It was a song of praise for the beauty of that day. It spoke of the endless cycling away of all his days into an eternal past. Yet this day was a gift, its ‘face washed clean by autumn dew'. ‘Instead of writing about it,' the poem concludes, ‘I will go out and enjoy it.'

I knew where to find him: in Curtain Square, the neighbourhood park, seated beneath the Moreton Bay figs. And when I did, we sat side by side, in silence, father and son, beyond words, in harmony, immersed in life itself.

Singing Eternity

I sit at your makeshift desk, a plank of masonite on wooden trestles and crates, arranged by the front window so that you could lift your head from your jumble of newspapers, journals and volumes of Yiddish poetry, to gaze out at Canning Street. I can see it now, as you saw it many times: the median strip, the palm, the poplar, a cyclist gliding by, the occasional car moving stealthily, mid-morning, along this suburban thoroughfare. ‘A miracle!' you once exclaimed. ‘Palm trees in Melbourne. At my front doorstep. Who would have thought it possible?'

On the desk lies your final work-in-progress, your last poem, scrawled in black biro. There are annotations, words added in, phrases crossed out, sentences cut short in mid-flight, as you summoned your dwindling reserves of energy to write, just hours before your death: ‘I feel like an anonymous leaf about to fall into eternity.'

Meier Zabludowski. My father. You passed away as you always wanted, in action, fully clothed, fighting the inevitable to the last. ‘Perhaps the Angel of Death has forgotten there are Jews still living in Carlton,' you said cheekily, just one month ago, as we walked along the neighbourhood streets on a winter's evening. He has certainly caught up with you now. We found you lying on the kitchen floor, on your back, fully outstretched. Instant death from a massive cardiac arrest, the doctor assured us. The fridge was stocked with your latest batch of latkes, on hand, as always, for unexpected guests. In the backyard stood a crop of silverbeet and two ceramic pots of forget-me-nots.

You were concerned that the forget-me-nots were not blooming, so you surrounded them with mirrors and slivers of glass to reflect the sun's rays upon them. You erected an umbrella to protect them from sudden downpours, and arranged warped boards of three-ply to shield them from winter squalls. One forget-me-not did bloom, on the day you died. It is still alive, days later, small and blue; like you in physical stature, like you in its contained radiance. Yet again, it seems, your eccentric devices have worked.

Everywhere, throughout the house, I come across them: your many contrivances and innovations. You could never leave things as they were. You were driven to improvise. When I gave you a dish rack, you converted it into a toolbox. Instead of buying new carpet for the dining room, you scoured opportunity shops for worn rugs. Over the years the conflicting patterns of layers of rugs did, I must admit, have a certain chaotic appeal. So it was with the kitchen linoleum, to which you added strip upon strip to create an erratic patchwork in varying degrees of wear. Your mind was forever churning with novel ways of creating order out of chaos, a wholeness out of fragments; and in time I came to understand that it could not be otherwise for someone with such a fractured past.

Fragments, everywhere. Above all, here—in the bedroom, your study, your sunlit retreat. I am surrounded by your fragments. Overwhelmed by them. This is my inheritance, your countless jottings in Yiddish, with scatterings of English, Hebrew, Polish, Russian; your rich overflow of aphorisms, curses, anecdotes, rewrites of favourite poems; and your innumerable reflections on time and space, energy and entropy, scribbled on scraps of paper, on the backs of used envelopes, in the margins of the journals and books which you brought from the old world—books which you were continually rebinding, rereading, reinterpreting.

‘Time is running out,' you often exclaimed over these past few years. You sensed death was imminent. You contrived calendars on which you marked the passing of days. You wrote poems that measured the ticking of a clock. You hurried towards oblivion, trotting on your hardened little legs, head held high, body erect, heart straining to its limits, before returning home afresh to your rickety desk to sort out more papers.

Barely one pile was disposed of before another was waiting to be raked up and filed away in folders made from recycled cardboard. These files are all around me now: on the marble mantelpiece, in the fireplace, under the mattress, beneath the bed, in chests of drawers, on the dressing table, in cupboards, on the tops of cupboards, in cardboard boxes, on shelves contrived from pieces of timber.

‘Little seed droppings,' you called this mounting chaos just weeks ago. ‘Who knows? Something may come of them.'

Let me tell you a story. Two tales, in fact. We might call one of them ‘The Poetic Journey of Meier Zabludowski'. This is the name he used to sign his earliest poems. The second is a story about a young Chinese immigrant we shall call—for he would rather not have his name revealed—Wang Liu. Our two heroes were born worlds apart, and decades removed in time. Yet their tales are intimately connected. I cannot tell the one without adding the other.

Born in the White Russian city of Bialystok, December 1905, my father died in July 1992. He was eighty-six years old. His life spanned almost an entire century, and two continents at opposite ends of the globe. At the time of his birth, Bialystok was a part of the Tsarist empire, under the rule of Nicholas II, emperor of all the Russias. A decade later it was occupied by the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm. By 1920, Bialystok was an integral part of the newly formed Republic of Poland. This is how it has always been, as former empires disintegrate into a chaotic patchwork of rival tribes, and maps dissolve overnight in rivers of blood.