Free Jewels and Ashes by Arnold Zable Page A

flowers, shrubs, and trees. Two Alsatians bark ferociously as I peer over the wall.
    A horse-drawn cart turns into Kievska and pulls aside to make way for a car. An elderly couple walk along the pavement, where tufts of grass spring from gaps between the cobblestones. Kievska on this rain-soaked day seems so familiar; yet so downtrodden and desolate, empty of the souls it once housed. Judenrein. A gust of wind catches the shutter on number 13 and slams it back to a close.
    Twenty-four hours later the sun soars above the city. The shutters on the cottages of Kievska are flung wide open. The windows frame displays of potplants. Several windowsills are a jungle of ferns and flowers which nestle together, vying like a crowd of eager spectators for a view of the street, where cobblestones smoulder under the sun, a muted blaze of faded reds and light browns.
    Kievska is within the Chanaykes, a neighbourhood where impoverished Jewish families were concentrated in a whirl of alleys, narrow streets, and back lanes which still continue to snake and curve into each other like dancing dervishes. I am surprised at how intact it appears, as if history had somehow overlooked this forgotten corner of the world. On days like this, I imagine, the Probutski children, the six sisters and three brothers, would spill into the streets to play in vacant lots strewn with weeds and rubbish. Or perhaps it wasn’t like that at all, and I am merely imposing such a scene on empty sites scattered throughout the neighbourhood like gaps in rows of rotting teeth.
    Ulitza Zolta is a dirt path which squeezes off Kievska between several cottages before opening out into a large clearing that resembles an abandoned town square. The Probutski family shifted house in 1920, from Kievska to somewhere in this vicinity; perhaps to the two-storey building which stands apart, overlooking the clearing.
    As I enter, I catch the scent of dust and rotting timber. A flight of stairs leads to a balcony which overlooks the square, but I cannot climb up to the attic that I believe my mother may have lived in. The way is barred by an old man who sits in an armchair on the first-floor landing. When I try to speak to him he does not respond. I hand him a note which Witold has written in Polish, explaining that my parents and their families may have once lived here. I am from Australia, the note adds, and I am searching for their former homes. The old man stares blankly into the distance. His head occasionally falls limply to his chest and rolls from side to side while he mumbles incoherently to himself.
    As I turn to leave I see a grey-haired lady clutching a shopping bag. She eyes me with suspicion as we pass each other on the stairs. I hand her the note, which she quickly scans. The old lady is unimpressed. I am an intruder.
    His apartment is on the second floor of a six-storey tenement; one of several drab grey blocks built up from the ghetto ruins in the immediate post-war years. It is now run-down, cracking at the seams, joints wracked by arthritis. The stairs smell of fried onions and neglect. I am ushered into a sparsely furnished living-room with a single bed, table, and television set on a linoleum-covered floor.
    He is rotund and squat, his substantial paunch offset by muscular shoulders that barely contain an outrageous energy which seems always on the verge of bursting beyond the confines of his tight body. He speaks to me with a conspiratorial air, while his hawk-like eyes, full of an ancient suspicion, dart from side to side, always alert, distracted. Buklinski, one of the very last of the Bialystoker Jews, has burst into my life.
    Buklinski disappears into the kitchen and dashes back with plates of stewed potatoes and gefilte fish. ‘Imported from Hungary’, he announces triumphantly, jabbing his fingers at the fish. He runs back and forth from the kitchen, and soon the table is laden with bowls of herring, pickled onions, loaves of bread, cheeses, and