Free Jewels and Ashes by Arnold Zable Page B

several bottles of vodka. Buklinski seats himself opposite and commands, in a voice strewn with gravel, ‘ Nu ? Eat! Is anyone stopping you? Who are you waiting for? The Messiah?’ He speaks a rich colloquial Yiddish laced with earth, fire, and black humour. Looking at me, he muses: ‘A miracle! Our Bialystoker have wandered off to the very ends of the earth in all their dark years, and yet their sons speak Yiddish. A miracle! Nu ? What are you waiting for? Eat!’
    The vodka flows. Buklinski’s monologue accelerates. He weaves tall stories in a frenzy. ‘I was born on Krakowska, in the Chanaykes, in that very same neighbourhood your mother lived in. We were crammed on top of each other; slept three, four, sometimes more to a bed. We froze in winter, baked in summer, and roamed the streets in gangs of little scoundrels who hunted in packs, seeing with our own eyes everything the heart desired — swindlers and saints, devoted mothers and beggars, prostitutes and yeshiva boys scurrying home, their eyes glued to their sacred books as they bumped into lamp posts. Ah, what a treasure it was to live in Bialystok! Well, my friend, what else could we do but love it? You think we had a choice? Well? What are you waiting for? Eat! Drink! Don’t be shy!’
    Whenever one dish is empty, Buklinski dashes back into the kitchen and emerges with reinforcements, plates piled high with cheese blintzes.
    â€˜This is my specialty, which you must eat.’
    â€˜You are like a Yiddishe mama’, I protest.
    â€˜I’m better than a Yiddishe mama. No Yiddishe mama makes blintzes like mine.’
    â€˜But I’m full. I can hold no more.’
    â€˜Full. Shmul. There is always room for more. Eat! I cannot rest until I see you eat.’
    Buklinski hovers around the table, restless, imploring, prodding, scolding: ‘Eat! I won’t sit down until you eat!’
    Where have I heard these familiar words, the same pleas, this same script? Where have I seen that same intensity, and felt that same tinge of menace in the voice? I have known other Buklinskis. They stood in Melbourne homes, by tables overflowing with food and drink, and talked of hunger and mud.
    â€˜In two things I am an expert’, Zalman would say. Zalman, the family friend, the Bialystoker, the survivor who had brought us tales from the kingdom of night. ‘About two things I know all there is to know. In these things I am a scholar, an expert, a professor. In all other things I may be an ignoramus, but on two subjects I can lecture for days on end and never come to the end of it: mud and hunger. We lived in mud. For six years we were soaked in it. We came to know its subtle changes in texture, from day to day, hour to hour, depending on the amount of rain, the number of wagons and dragging feet that churned it up, the number of work battalions that laboured through it. The ghetto was an empire of mud. And hunger. Hunger had so many nuances, so many symptoms. Sometimes you felt so light, so empty, you could fly. But always it was an infernal ache, a relentless yearning, a search for any possible thing that could be chewed and swallowed. And now I know that a kitchen must be full, and a man is a fool who does not seize a chance to eat…’
    But this is no time to philosophize. Buklinski has opened a second bottle of vodka. He is up on his feet, dancing around the table like a boxer between rounds. I try to break into his monologue from time to time, but Buklinski is a bulldozer who flattens me with his manic, domineering, frenzied, suspicious, yet affectionate energy. One moment he has his arms around me, and is kissing my cheeks with joy while exclaiming how good it is to have such a guest, a son of Bialystoker come half-way around the planet, the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski, no less, whom we all knew, and who didn’t know him as he stood under the town clock selling newspapers, telling us what was going on in