As they stepped off the train mid-afternoon they were greeted by a goat, bleating insistently as it wagged its tail. A thick cord was tied around its scraggy neck, the frayed end dragging in the mud. The heat was stifling. Alter sighed. Anna squeezed his hand. She had encouraged a stopover in Katherine so that he might see the sense of community among some of the immigrants she had met over the years.
The goat started butting its head against Alter’s suitcase, as if it recognised an old friend. Alter grabbed the rope and the animal licked his trouser leg as it followed them towards the stationmaster’s office, a whitewashed wooden building with a long veranda and a corrugated-iron roof. A lonely cloud scudded slowly across the horizon, haloes of flies and mosquitoes buzzed around them. Anna’s stomach rumbled. She felt a sudden urge for a serving of fried fish, even though they were 200 miles away from the nearest ocean.
A group of children rushed towards them, shouting excitedly. One young boy with fair hair and freckles made a beeline for the goat.
‘Pirozhki! Idi syuda!’ He stood in front of them, holding out his hand to entice the goat to come to him.
Handing over the rope, with Pirozhki attached, Alter bent down to whisper something in the boy’s ear.
‘Spasiba,’ the child answered in perfect Russian, then doffed his hat and bowed to Anna. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with an equally distinctive Australian twang.
Alter embarked on an animated discussion with the boy. They spoke in Russian like two long-lost friends, smiling as they took turns to pat the goat on its head. Words flew between them like flapping birds, Alter’s voice quavering with enthusiasm.
He turned to Anna. ‘Truth lies with children and fools.’
She smiled but didn’t bother questioning what he meant. He might be a poet, but sometimes he spoke in such cryptic riddles that she found it a little tiresome. She looked out beyond the station, towards the town. Compared to Birdum it was a bustling metropolis.
As they walked slowly away from the station, the boy and his goat followed close behind.
‘Who would believe it?’ Alter said. ‘A child speaking Russian, right here at the edge of the world.’
He stopped suddenly in front of a sign posted on a hut, as though he had been struck by lightning, reading the bold Cyrillic script out loud. There was an English translation scribbled underneath:
Administrative Office
Russian Peanut Farmers Association
Katherine
‘Pyotr!’ A man wearing jodhpurs tucked into high leather boots came running towards them.
He wore a fleece papakha on his head, a type of hat Alter had seen worn by Cossacks back in Russia. The fingers of the man’s left hand were latched inside the top of a brightly coloured waistcoat. He spoke sternly in Russian to the boy, pointing towards a crowd of people in the distance. Turning away, the child tugged on the rope and retreated, followed reluctantly by the goat.
The man held his hands out to Anna. ‘Hello, my dear. Good to see you again after so long.’ It had been two years since he had visited Birdum. He gently touched his lips to the back of Anna’s hand, and then turned to Alter.
‘Jack,’ he said, holding out his hand as he bowed. ‘My apologies to you both. They grow up a little too wild around here, I’m afraid.’
Alter liked a man with a firm handshake. ‘I am Alter Mayseh. And I think he’s a lovely boy.’
‘Ha ha! I meant the goat. She’s a reckless, foolish thing. But her milk is as sweet as manna from Heaven.’ Jack smiled at Anna, and turned back to Alter. ‘My late wife was the visiting doctor for the area, until she herself took ill and died a few months later.’
‘I’m so very sorry to hear that.’ Alter looked down at his feet.
The urgent whistling of a bird pierced the awkward silence.
‘Ah, well,’ Jack said. ‘Sadly, that is God’s will. But at least her memory is carried by our young Pyotr. She would have wanted us to live our lives to the fullest.’ Jack slapped the side of his thigh and beamed at them. ‘So, you were stuck in Birdum because of the rains?’
Alter glanced at Anna. ‘Not for too long.’
‘Well then, welcome to Katherine. Come! Let me show you around our lovely township. I insist that you stay with me.’
‘That’s very kind of you, um, Jack.’ Alter looked at him quizzically. ‘If I may be so bold, what is your Russian name?’
The tall man laughed. ‘Da, da, da! Yes, of course. My name is Arkady Ivanov, but here everyone calls me Jack.’
A few ramshackle houses were huddled together along one side of the river. Jack carried their bags in one hand. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with bushy eyebrows shading his blue-grey eyes. Alter followed him towards the main street. Anna walked beside him, imagining she caught the scent of cinnamon in the air. Jack led them along a route past the ruins of an old shack. The sound of a mandolin came from inside. A sweet melody.
‘That is Oleg, playing his bandura,’ Jack said. ‘You have arrived at the perfect time. Today is a festive day for us. The celebration of our annual peanut harvest.’
They reached a crowd of people, all in their finest Cossack dress. The women wore traditional red frocks with colourful ribbons and scarves threaded through their hair. A young girl sang like a nightingale as she stood beside a wild pig roasting on a spit. They all congregated in front of a shack with a makeshift cross tied to its roof – a school doubling as a church. It nestled between a pub and a post office. There was plenty of laughter and an abundance of vodka.
From the other end of the dusty main street, a black horse came galloping towards them. A man stood on its back, jumping up and turning to land in the saddle backwards. He was followed by three more horses, straddled by a team of acrobats performing somersaults and handstands as they hurtled past the cheering crowd.
Anna dropped her hat. Out of the blue, a young rider holding a whip between his teeth came racing up on his horse and, with a spectacular leap, picked the hat up and placed it back on her head. Before she knew it, he had remounted and galloped off down the main street.
Jack laughed. ‘Cossacks have always been excellent horsemen, and these tricks have given us the reputation of being unconquerable. It is called dzhigitovka,’ he said. ‘It turns the rider into a deadly strike weapon. Even Napoleon said with just the Cossacks alone, he could conquer all of Europe.’
The indigo sky was turning dark. Jack invited them to join him for tea, which ended up being accompanied by a few too many shots of vodka for them all. The lives of forgotten people hung heavy in the air, voices of writers, poets and musicians from far away, echoing the past. Alter told him how he had made his way to Warsaw as a young man, joining the Haliastra, a group of artists and writers who were filled with dreams of a new world. Galloping Jack, it turned out, had turned his misfortune into song. A gifted violinist and painter, he fled from the freshly formed Communist regime and frozen tundras of Russia.
‘Music was my passport out of there,’ Jack told them. ‘My family came from Yekaterinburg. When the Whites and Reds converged on the Urals, my parents packed all they could into a wooden box and two large suitcases and piled us onto the roof of a crowded train headed to Omsk. I kept my violin beside me the whole way across Siberia.’ He stroked the case of his violin. ‘After several weeks we reached Manchuria, and soon settled into our new life, in Harbin. My mother called it the Moscow of the East.’
Talking about the destruction of their former lives sobered the two men a little. Alter looked around Jack’s shanty. Tins of beans and sardines were piled up against one wall.
‘I won’t eat anything fresh,’ Jack confessed. He pointed to a pile of empty tins in a basket in the corner. ‘Although, if Communist spies decide to come all the way over here to poison me, it would be a far better fate than being taken back to Russia, I suppose.’
He and his young son lived in a hut with a makeshift roof of corrugated iron, their beds formed from compacted ant mounds. Alter could see the mark of how high the waters had reached when the river overflowed its bank. An old truck stood out back. Jack led his visitors across the yard towards it. He invited them in, helping Anna step up some rickety stairs and through a doorway at the side. She rubbed her eyes in disbelief. It looked like a robber’s hideout filled with shiny jewels, a secret cave of forgotten treasures.
Strings of silvery planets ran from floor to ceiling. They were fashioned from empty sardine tins. Jack had built a universe in the back of his truck, with tin galaxies clinking in the gentle breeze. Painted comets twirled about on chains. Much of the wire ceiling had caved in under its astronomical weight and the iron sun had been corroded by weather. A sign painted in giant childish script shouted: PLANETARIUM.
The pale hem of day started fraying. A chorus of cicadas trilled as night surrounded them. Anna looked up at the moon between the wires and couldn’t be sure if it was real, or part of Jack’s sculpted world. In the distance, a nightbird howled like a mother who had lost her child. Along one side the roof was open to the fading sky. Above the other side, it was already night and stars winked at them. It smelled of rust and dust. And something else, too – the whiff of rotting fish.
Jack stood up, a little wobbly on his feet. ‘A toast to this country that has given us shelter. Thank you for visiting us, Anna and Alter. Here’s to your onward journey, my friends. Prost!’
Alter raised his glass. ‘Here’s to a better world.’
Anna peered through the chicken-wire roof at the rain clouds gathering again above them. ‘I’ll drink to that!’