We walk along Frunze Street (my mum and Ira’s favourite street) to their old place of work. But the institute is no longer there: it must have been demolished not that long ago. I can see that Ira is stunned. The two of them loved that place – their entire collective was young, fun and creative, and they all got on spectacularly well. No office or lab has ever been like that again. Ira had wanted us to take a picture of the institute for Mum – the thought itself seemed innately pleasurable to her, maybe because she imagined the pleasure Mum would derive from looking at a photograph of this unlikely palace of fun where they had had such a ball together.
In the absence of buildings, all we have is stories and people. Ira organises lunch with two other women from the institute, Elya and another Sveta – a mini-reunion to ‘make benefit’ of their glorious Australian guests. This social occasion at Elya’s place in Kurenyovka, near Babi Yar, is a chance for them all to catch up; they have stayed in touch, but do not get to see each other as often as they would like. Elya was always the impeccable hostess in the group, and she feeds us magnificent savoury and sweet cakes and, together with the other Sveta, asks question after question, trying to imagine Mum’s life in Australia. I tell them as much as I can – about the blue skies and the ocean; about my mum’s flower garden, which she reinvents every few months changing everything but the roses’ unquestioned dominance; about health care; the Australian political system (strangely enough, the Ukrainian press has missed Kevin Rudd’s apotheosis); and the size of utility bills as compared with an average monthly pension. I tell them that Mum is the same – still funny and irreverent – and I cannot help noticing their relief. They ask whether she drives, if and how she colours her hair, what her guilty pleasures are (once in a while she goes to a casino with one particular friend). I tell them that every working day my mum and auntie come to look after Miguel and that I have had the same level of support with Billie. I add that many of my girlfriends believe that I am the one who has hit the jackpot, and that if they had had Mum and Lina in their corners they could have done literally anything in this life (I know it!).
Elya and Sveta wonder what it was like for Mum to go from being an electrical engineer to a supervisor in a day-care centre for the elderly. I tell them that the assessment of overseas qualifications is a royal mess in Australia and that Mum could not get her engineering qualifications recognised, so she never worked another day as an engineer after we left Ukraine. I also tell them that when my mum recently retired (primarily in order to help me with Miguel), the whole day-care centre went wild, her bosses, colleagues and the elderly people she had looked after literally begging her to stay. In a place that could so easily have felt like a quick and dreary stopover on the way to the aged care home, Mum was for years one of the chief anti-depressants. I tell them how good my mum’s English is and how – what better proof is there – she incessantly reads for pleasure in both English and Russian, without distinguishing between the two, and how when I write my English-language books it is Mum I invariably imagine as my first reader. I know that Australia will remain a phantom for Elya and Sveta, but perhaps their old, much-loved friend with an improbable second life in Australia will be less so.
We call Melbourne on Skype, the webcam is playing up but the connection is clear. We crowd around Elya’s husband’s computer shouting something in the direction of the screen. Jokes, interruptions, laughter, Skype disconnecting unexpectedly, but for a moment the whole ridiculous, loud, disorganised bunch of us all itching to say something to Mum feels absolutely right. Back in Australia a few weeks later, I try to recreate this afternoon for my mum – everything from the fillings in Elya’s cakes to the trajectories of our conversation. I cannot stop wondering how this story makes Mum feel, but I can’t bring myself to ask. I remember how strange it felt when my sister, who happened to be in Ukraine at the time, went to my class’s graduation in Kharkov in 1991. Most generously, she took several of my friends out for a celebratory lunch and sent me pictures of them all sitting around the long table – looking so normal and so unrecognisable at once. During that lunch my sister represented me, stood for me, but also stood for the finality of my absence. Years later my friends told me that this was one of the saddest lunches of their lives. I know, of course I know, that you cannot go anywhere by proxy, let alone go back. But all I can do is tell Mum what I saw and felt. After all, I met Ira, Elya and the other Sveta because Mum trusted me with her friends and with her past. So I tell her everything I can about her city and her ‘girls’, as Billie listens on, tirelessly correcting me. I am a vessel in the middle so I try to let it all flow – from Melbourne to Kiev and all the way back.
13
BABI YAR
IF THERE IS A sacred site for my family anywhere in the world then it would have to be Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev inextricably linked to the fate of the Jews in World War II. Romany people, Ukrainians and Soviet POWs were also shot in their thousands here, their bodies were also burnt by the German Army and formed part of the heavy, oily smoke that rose over the ravine and hovered in the air, but Babi Yar is first and foremost the site of the largest single massacre during the Holocaust. At least thirty-three thousand Jewish men, women and children were murdered there over two days in September 1941. A twelve-year-old boy living a stone’s throw from the ravine later described the sounds of ‘calm, measured shooting as if during a practice’, sounds which finally dispelled any glimmer of hope, any illusion that those residents of the city who had obediently assembled in response to an edict from its German invaders were to be merely deported.
The first in half a handful of distinguished writers to speak about the fate of Soviet Jews during the war, Vasily Grossman came upon the story of Babi Yar as a war correspondent embedded, you might say, with the Red Army as it liberated Ukraine. Grossman was Jewish; his mother, Ekaterina, was one of the thirty thousand Jews of Berdichev massacred in northern Ukraine in the same month that was marked forever by the events at Babi Yar. Grossman’s article ‘Ukraine without Jews’, which appeared in 1943, is a revelation. An obituary of his people (our people), it is unlike the great mass of Soviet war reporting, which converted all Jewish men, women and children into undifferentiated peaceful Soviet civilians brutally murdered by Fascists. Devastated by what he saw, Grossman refused to remove ethnicity from the equation. ‘There are no Jews left in Ukraine,’ he wrote. ‘All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered.’
Grossman’s war reporting went beyond the Holocaust – for instance, his remarkable reportage was used extensively in Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad, and Beevor subsequently edited and annotated the English-language translation of Grossman’s wartime notebooks. Yet it is Grossman’s writings concerning the fate of Eastern European Jewry that have proved most enduring. His article from 1944 on Treblinka, the first extensive account of a German concentration camp in any language, was used as testimony in the Nuremberg Trials. After the war, this kind of writing would become altogether unacceptable to the Soviet regime, as any specific references to the Holocaust were eradicated. In front of German machine-gun fire, inside the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, all Soviet victims were said to be created equal.
And so the Black Book, a collection of testimonies and historical materials about the fate of Soviet Jews that Grossman compiled with another writer, war reporter and Jew, Ilya Ehrenbuch, was not allowed to go to print. Decades later in 1961, in the middle of Khrushchev’s thaw, all copies of Grossman’s major work, Life and Fate, were confiscated by the KGB. In desperation, Grossman wrote directly to Khrushchev asking him to undo this banning of a book to which the writer had ‘given his life’. Grossman wanted a response and he got one, not from the Soviet leader himself but from Mikhail Suslov, a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet responsible for matters of ideology. Life and Fate could not be published for at least two hundred years, he was told. It finally came out under Gorbachev in the late 1980s, when the Holocaust ceased to be taboo; the Black Book followed in 1991. By that time Grossman had been dead for quarter of a century.