Free Jewels and Ashes by Arnold Zable

prey to the wolves. The Great War erupts. The armies of Kaiser Wilhelm capture a city set adrift in a no man’s land between past and future. There is fighting in the streets. Regimes come and go overnight. Europe is frantically sorting itself out. Red Army fights White Army. Poles, Tartars, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians flex their nationalist muscles. Each tribe wants its own territory, while Jews and Gypsies look on perplexed, not quite sure which way the wind is blowing. Mother and father run errands for their families in streets where armies sweep past them running east and west. At night they shelter at home to the sound of sporadic gunfire and artillery.
    â€˜March, march Pilsudski’, is the cry of the hour. In the 1920s the veteran nationalist triumphs and consolidates a reborn Poland. For two decades the infant republic remains poised in an uneasy truce between wars. Bialystok appears to flourish. Schools, secular and religious; houses of worship and study; cinemas and theatres; cafes, choirs, orchestras, and political parties all overflow with patrons, supporters, and fellow travellers. And years later group photos will appear in the albums of a vanished city, portraits frozen into still lives within which, if one looks closely enough, it is possible to discern the tiny face of my mother as a member of the Morning Star gymnastics troupe, or my father on an outing in the forests, with comrades of a youth movement called Future.
    It could be said that these are good years: the harvests quite abundant; communal life intimate; love affairs permeated by the scent of forests; couples strolling arm in arm along tree-lined Sienkiewicza Avenue. And yet there are those who are boarding trains for distant ports, slipping away to faraway corners of the earth with a healthy sense of premonition, or just plain luck in having received a visa moments before the city gates are closed. To the west, armies are again assembling, with a ferocious hunger for conquest and territory, and a calculating madman at the helm.
    As I wander the streets of Bialystok for the first time I follow primitive maps drawn by my parents, indicating the various neighbourhoods they had lived in. A light rain falls incessantly. A damp veil hangs over the city and keeps me at a distance. A cat sits inside a cottage window in front of a white lace curtain. Pedestrians scurry by under umbrellas and newspapers. More than ever Bialystok seems ethereal, a dream whose texture eludes me.
    A fair-haired boy appears at the window and edges in beside the cat. He stares at me with cold suspicion, until I realise that I am confronting him with my sense of disorientation. When I smile, the boy instantly reflects my change of mood. He is joined by a girl of about three, a sister perhaps, and we are drawn, the four of us, into a sort of complicity, a bond of recognition between stranger, boy, girl, and cat. Someone calls from within the house. The children withdraw. The welcoming committee has retreated; but the veil has lifted, and I find myself in Ulitza Kievska, the street where my mother lived in the years immediately after World War 1.
    The cobblestones of Kievska glisten under fresh coats of rain. The moisture has subdued their colours into sombre ochres and burgundies. Kievska is a mere hundred metres long, wedged between Ulitzas Grunwaldzka and Mlynowa. Mother had placed her house at number 14, perhaps 13. Number 13 is an abandoned weatherboard. The shutters are closed, except for one which swings in and out with the breeze. Through it I can see rooms scattered with debris, loose floorboards, and broken bottles. Directly opposite is a threestorey greystone building with an arched entrance: number 10. It fits mother’s description, but not the address. Numbers 12 to 16 are non existent. In their place a stone wall encloses a yard piled high with used tyres and car parts. Adjoining the yard is an unkempt garden in which vegetable patches merge with wild