Tree (Tapestry)

our family, timber merchants, the ones who fled Russia to Persia
the first time, 1921, Baku across the Caspian Sea to Krasuovodsk,
then horse and mule in a convoy across the mountains
gorges and fast mountain rivers—my grandmother wrote
“Mother sat enthroned on big cushions on a horse
holding 6 months old uncle Moulik on her lap.” So it took
twelve days, bugs, the baby’s dysentery, malaria for
everyone else, until they met Father and lived in Teheran
in a lovely house with a beautiful garden for two years
before going back to Baku. Father was arrested in the early hours,
released, rearrested, released and went to Moscow to obtain
exit permits and visas for Palestine. Hearing he was to be
rearrested, an uncle bought a train ticket for Odessa to coincide
with Father’s train home, the two trains arriving at Rostov
at the same time on the same platform, the two men
changed places. To join him in Odessa our family had to do
everything in secret: “nothing was packed and when we left the house
it was as if we were going visiting someone living in the next street.”
Always we had to wait for other trains either filled with soldiers
or deportees to pass. At every station there was a mad rush
at the huge urns for boiling water to make tea; always there was fear
that someone would be left behind. From Odessa, by ship to Jaffa.
...............“That is how we left Russia in 1923 or 4.
...............We never saw any of the relatives since.”


our family’s other branch, a story about the ones who fled Russia to Germany,
what timing! that they started over in the Weimar Republic, did well
and then fled again, left everything again, went back to Russia, Stalin,
disappeared into the white of another siege, or maybe Siberia, hard
to tell. That emptiness of not seeing them: for my grandmother
who remembered the spacious house, the nursemaids, the tutors,
who on returning lived crammed into a few rooms, tight and close,
a wealth of family—what was it for her, now in England with her own
daughters and a husband with the army in Belgium, for them safe in Palestine
to hear nothing? to wait through the war, to show Moulik old photos
faces fading against the black garments, the sun-drenched background
so he would know them: This is your uncle, who saved your father. These
are your cousins. And how memory works, the little boy says, yes,
I remember them. I remember the tree in the courtyard. I remember
the light against the tree, its shadow against the wall where they sat.
The husband brings home stories of lacemakers, the old ladies in Brussels
making delicate patterns in thread. They don’t talk of fighting, have
no words yet for what has happened—they don’t even know whether
the family is gone, only that it is lost. They might say, “pogrom,”
when the children have gone to bed, when the great-grandmother
travels over from Israel. They might say, “purge.” They write in ink
on the back of the photographs, names in English. The daughters grow
up. move away, a quarter of a century passes. Then there is a phone call.
They are in Israel, the cousins are in Israel. There are more phone calls,
letters, my grandmother goes to see them, brings back embroidery:
this is what she sells, the cousin, needlework of native plants, a side-line.
Really she is a specialist, in demand: she repairs Gobelin tapestries.
She repairs only the faces, the ones that have vanished into time.