IT BEGAN EARLY IN LIFE, his love of trees. He traces it to Zwierziniec, a forest on the outskirts of Bialystok — a city within the empire of Nicholas 11, Czar of Poland and Autocrat of all the Russias. It was a time of prosperity for the Zabludowski family. In summer they would retreat to the dachas, cottages that were hired for holidays within cool forests, well away from scorched and dry city streets. And in a forest called Zwierziniec my father made his first acquaintance with trees.
There was one in particular, many centuries old, a massive chestnut tree. While describing it father climbs onto a kitchen chair. ‘Its trunk was solid and thick’, he says, and lifts his hands from his stomach in an expansive gesture. He spreads his arms as if about to take flight; its canopy was so broad and high it exploded towards the heavens. Underneath, lovers sat on summer nights while bands played on stands in the clearing that surrounded the tree. Children ran about in circles, their excitement barely under control, and gathered chestnuts that had fallen to the ground. When prised from their husks, the nuts emerged as smooth as lacquered furniture and were used as marbles and currency. Three were worth one sweet, father recalls with accuracy over seventy years later. Boys stuffed their pockets with nuts, and their homes became so littered with them that people tripped over, and exasperated mothers would yell, ‘Get those accursed chestnuts out of here’.
When father tells a story he enters into it and becomes the object he describes. There is a chestnut tree growing in the kitchen, sprouting from a chair, branches spreading, outstretched limbs reaching towards the ceiling. He is on his toes now, an eighty-year-old man trying to grow taller. ‘Be careful’, I warn him, ‘or you’ll topple over.’ I don’t fancy the prospect of an uprooted chestnut tree sprawling across the kitchen floor.
‘I can see it now, as if it were in front of my eyes’, mother tells me. She conjures images of childhood on a distant continent. Father draws maps of a city for me. Streets flow into a central square, and he recalls their names as if he still lived in them. It is almost half a century since he last walked them. ‘I can see it now, as if it were in front of my eyes’, mother says. She describes scenes at random. An epic unfolds in fragments: tales of flight through snow-laden fields at night; a wagon piled high with cucumbers drawn by a pair of horses plodding towards a village market in the pre-dawn darkness; an isolated town caught in the crossfire between rival kingdoms; a ragged band of paupers ransacking an abandoned palace; a boat they called the Wild Mama, rolling and swaying on stormy seas — countless images evoked at the kitchen table of a Melbourne house by two ageing parents for a son about to leave on a journey.
It is not often that I walk with mother nowadays through the streets of the neighbourhood she has lived in for forty years. She remains, most of the time, secluded at home. For hours on end she sits quietly by the kitchen table. The radio drones in the background tuned to talkback shows, classical music, and the proceedings of Parliament. The hours are punctuated by news bulletins. The days revolve around the meals she prepares slowly, as she summons her last reserves of energy, moving from sink to cupboard, fridge to stove, navigating her kingdom of bare necessities. Between chores she sits quietly again. When I come across her at such times I am soothed rather than saddened. The room is permeated with solitude. In mother there is a gentleness, a feeling that life’s struggle is almost over, a sense of twilight and long nights that extend towards eternity.
We walk together through the familiar terrain of my childhood on a day of seamless blue skies. The sun hovers on the northern horizon; winter light in Melbourne radiates softly, with a clarity that reveals objects and people in transparent detail. I notice how much mother has aged, how slowly she walks, the streaks of grey that thread through her once pitch-black hair. Frailty is edging in at the limbs. She is, it seems, becoming smaller, succumbing with quiet resignation.
We enter the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. The afternoon sun filters through lace curtains, spreading uneven pools of light onto a coffee table stacked with magazines. Mother’s hands tremble as she reaches for something to read. Several years earlier I had noticed this shaking for the first time. She was handing me a cup of tea: the cup rattled, tea spilled into the saucer, and I was shocked into the realisation that mother had crossed that imperceptible border which divides us from the realm of old age and fragility.
While we wait, an elderly woman enters the doctor’s rooms. When she glances at mother a strong current of recognition passes between them, something far more powerful than a warm greeting between good friends. They are ‘ship sisters’, having met over fifty years ago in the port of Marseilles. Soon after, they had boarded the French boat the Ville d’Amien; after the first storm they began to call her the Wild Mama, because she bucked and rolled on wild seas.
Their bond is as strong as any ties of blood. They are on the threshold of the ninth decade of their lives, but in this moment of surprise encounter they stand outside time. They are ship sisters who left behind them a way of life, an indelible intimacy, family and friends they were never to see again. As they sailed from Marseilles in January 1933, the passengers heard the news that Hitler had become Chancellor of Germany. ‘We knew enough to be disturbed’, mother has told me. ‘But how could we know what was going to happen and how immense it would be?’
The Wild Mama was steaming away from Europe, wrenched free from a continent that was beginning to seethe and boil. Cauldrons of ancient tribal hatreds were being fanned towards an explosion; and between the Old World and the New, the Wild Mama ploughed through a furious sea.
‘Do you ever think about those you left behind?’, I ask father. ‘Not often’, he says. ‘Such memories are a luxury I can’t afford.’
He guards himself, in his day-to-day existence, from sinking into reveries on the past. Many times, during the years since he retired, he has told me that each day of added life is a miracle. There are mornings he awakens as if paralysed; with sheer will he propels himself out of bed, shakes his limbs and, slowly, with increasing vigour and precision, he sets about his daily chores.
‘Just put one foot in front of the other’, he tells me: out to the bathroom to wash and shave; to the shops to buy food and newspapers; into the kitchen to make breakfast. In old age he has been able to make the kitchen a part of his domain, at least in the mornings, when mother usually sleeps. He chops onions, grates potatoes, shreds cabbage, and fries them with whipped eggs into thick cakes until they are blackened on the outsides. ‘That is when you know they are ready on the insides’, he claims, in defence of his method. He has developed his formulas and sticks to them. They are his recipes for survival. But he may also throw in a few raisins or almonds — ‘to keep my imagination alive’, he explains.
He has an explanation for everything. He reads newspapers, ‘to keep myself alert’. He studies chosen articles, underlines sentences in red biro, and scrawls commentaries in the margins like a talmudic scholar interpreting a sacred text. He extracts philosophical comments from even the most mundane of news items, and copies them onto scraps of paper which he gathers eventually into notebooks.
‘Just put one foot in front of the other, and don’t stop moving until you have extracted your full measure of life from the day’, he tells me, and moves into the backyard. He points proudly to this season’s tomatoes, radishes, and silver beet, as he waters his patch of soil. It measures two metres by about ten, and is divided into segments marked off by primitive fences made of wire mesh. ‘I love form’, he says. ‘This is why I garden: to experiment with form and to create symmetry.’ He takes up a shovel and deepens the hole he is preparing for his next batch of compost; and I recall a time when I was coming into my first focussed view of the world, and milk was still delivered by horse-drawn cart. Father would go into the street to collect the fresh manure that had been left behind the previous night, and would spread it over the same backyard plot he is now tending for the fortieth year.
He guards himself from disturbing thoughts and memories, and has done so for many years; as he must, for he is the sole survivor of his once large family. ‘There are not enough hours in the day for what I want to do’, he has told me many times. ‘Why waste them in recalling things that have long since gone?’
Yet there is one way, at least, in which father does maintain links with the past. He is a hoarder, especially of old documents, newspapers, magazines, letters. The newspapers pile up, and he spends many hours sorting and rearranging them. Occasionally he gets rid of some, but only after he has gone through them carefully again to make sure he is not losing something of great importance.
‘Do you ever think of those you left behind?’, I persist. Father responds by going into his bedroom and emerging with the yellowed pages of a Yiddish newspaper stained with brown pock-marks of decay. The disintegrating pages are held together with strips of transparent tape which track through headlines, news commentaries, features, radio timetables, advertisements, reviews of concerts and lectures, and notices of births, engagements, marriages, and deaths. The date is March 17, 1936. On the masthead is printed the proud claim that Unzer Lebn is the oldest and most widely-circulated Bialystok daily. Towards the lower right-hand corner on the front page, within a space four inches by two, framed in black, is printed the announcement:
To our beloved son, brother and brother-in-law Meier. On the occasion of his departure for New Zealand, we wish him a heartfelt bon voyage and a happy future in his new homeland.
In his customary red biro, father has reinforced the black frame to isolate this insert from those that surround it. Directly below is a notification of the drawing on this day of a lottery conducted by the orphans’ welfare society. Above it is advertised a forthcoming series of lectures by the renowned pedagogue Sholem Broide of Warsaw: ‘Be enthralled by his slide-illustrated talks about his recent journeys to ancient cities of the Mediterranean! A rare insight into other worlds for the people of Bialystok!’. To the left is the news that Celina Sandler, ‘for many years a Professor at the Université de Beauté in Paris’, no less, will be giving advice from her suite at the Hotel Ritz, for absolutely no cost. And to the right is a proclamation of a special unbeatable quality Passover matzos, now available from Messer Brothers Bakery.
Over the matzos advertisement is attached a note, on a scrap of paper which apparently father had inserted several years ago, indicating how the various signatories to the farewell notice were related to him. Yet again he had written in red, as if to alert any curious descendants who might stumble across the newspaper in years to come, and to provide them with a means of deciphering this clue to branches of the family tree.
On March 17, 1936 father bought Unzer Lebn for the final time. That night he boarded a train to begin a one-way journey to the other side of the globe, his newspaper tucked away in trunks crammed with books and journals. Decades later they were to become the decaying reminders of the world he had left behind.
December 26, 1932. Mother stands by the Warsaw express at the Bialystok station. Her closest friends are clustered around, conveying their final farewells; among them is Meierke, her husband of a day. The luggage has already been taken to her compartment; the train is warming up. At this moment, mother catches sight of Reb Aron Yankev in the distance, on the platform, running frantically towards her. The black caftan he is wearing trails down to his ankles and flutters by his side as he rushes beside the train.
When mother had left the family apartment several hours earlier, Reb Aron Yankev had, as usual, maintained his silence towards her. In his eyes, the daughter who was about to depart had long since strayed from the righteous path of Orthodoxy, lured by modernity and worldliness. He broke his silence for just a moment, as she was leaving, to remind her to kiss the mezuzah attached by the door. Chane Esther, the matriarch of the Probutski household, also decided not to accompany her daughter to the station. She was too ill and, I suspect, much too upset. What my mother recalls is that Chane Esther’s last gesture was to insist on her drinking a glass of milk to fortify her for the journey. ‘Five weeks at sea?’, she had queried. ‘You’ll die of hunger.’
Mother tells stories in fragments. Over the years she has retold the same anecdotes many times. Her experiences flow through her, always liable to leap out unexpectedly in moments of unguarded reflection. The sight of Reb Aron Yankev dashing along the platform of the Bialystok station is one of these recurring images; as too is the glass of milk.
From such lean and Spartan clues I have reinvented her journey. On the Warsaw express she had wept incessantly. A pair of lovers sat in her compartment whispering to each other until they disembarked and disappeared into the night at a provincial station. Warsaw was a dream shaded with heartbreak at the loss of Bialystok. After staying overnight at her brother Joshua’s, she arrived back at the Warsaw station to pandemonium and a sea of farewell tears as hundreds of immigrants resumed or began their journeys to the West. The train departed at midnight, and for the first time since leaving Bialystok she gave way to exhaustion and fell into a deep sleep.
She was woken at dawn by the voices of German border-police asking for passports and papers. She ate breakfast in Berlin, crossed the Belgian border at night, and waited for several hours at the Paris station, shivering in a hall crowded with passengers falling asleep against each other. Mother recalls a collective meal to which fellow immigrants contributed salami, sardines, and schnapps; and many times she has told me about her first-ever glimpse of the sea, as the train emerged from the night and rushed towards Marseilles. Wonderful pictures began to form before her eyes: green fields; a ring of mountains with their summits covered in snow; and then the glistening ocean, aflame in the morning sun. Over the water’s surface there glided an aeroplane, and at the docks the Wild Mama was waiting.
The living quarters, when mother first saw them, seemed like crowded pigsties. In the first few days she was confined below deck, nauseated, as furious storms whipped up heavy seas. In Alexandria she disembarked and bought a gift — two black elephants carved in wood — for the sister who awaited her in Melbourne. And as she sailed through the Suez Canal she was riveted by what was to become the most indelible of memories: Bedouin boys diving for coins that flew from the decks of the boat.
Yet throughout that voyage, even as she succumbed to the adventure, to the breath of unlimited freedom that wafted across open seas, and to that special bond that develops between immigrants thrown together by chance to become ship brothers and sisters with a common destiny, my mother could not shake off her vision of Reb Aron Yankev, running frantically along the platform of the Bialystok station, desperate to make one last contact with his estranged daughter. He had paused for a moment when he reached her, to steady his voice, before he said, somewhat hesitantly, ‘I wish you a safe journey and a successful future in your new home. And I forgive you’.
When she recalls this moment, mother invariably adds, ‘And how could I have known that I would never see them again? Not only my father, but almost everyone who stood there on the Bialystok station farewelling me?’.
His parents were not informed. Her father had no idea at the time, although Chane Esther the matriarch knew, and one of her brothers was a witness. From father’s family there were no witnesses. The minyan of ten males required by traditional law had to be rounded up; there were always people on hand to make an extra zloty as witnesses on such occasions. The rabbi performed the ceremony quickly. Bishke Zabludowski happened to pass by the marriage bureau soon after.
‘Mazel-tov’, the office workers exclaimed. And why should I be congratulated?’, he replied. ‘Don’t you know?’, came the shocked answer. ‘Your son Meier has just been married.’
‘We didn’t confide in our parents’, father has told me. ‘We never discussed our personal affairs with them. In the pride of our youth we saw ourselves as being far in advance of previous generations. We were freethinkers, breaking away from stifling traditions; at least, this is what we thought at the time. Many of us didn’t bother getting married. The major problem was finding a room. Once you found one, you could begin “married” life.’
They were officially married because, they hoped, the papers would enable him to receive a permit to the New World after his wife had settled there. They didn’t require a room because she went home immediately after the ceremony to pack. She had received a permit from a sister who had migrated several years previously. The newly-weds were not to see each other for over three years.
My father loves words. It is a passion that still grips him at the onset of his ninth decade. The discovery of a new word — its origins, precise meaning, nuances, and variations — can make his day. Father’s most prized possessions are his dictionaries, among which are the rare ones he took with him on the sea voyage from Europe half a century ago. Instead of clothes he packed books and dictionaries: Polish-Yiddish, English-Polish, RussianYiddish, German-Russian, Hebrew-English; all the permutations of the six languages he has mastered over a long lifetime.
Father claims he knows what his first words were, his first naming of things, the earliest labels he attached to the world. It is 1907. A two-year-old boy dressed in a sailor’s suit runs beside his mother through a town square. Above him looms the clock-tower of Bialystok. He points to the tower and at an object moving through the streets. He names them, and his naming becomes a refrain he repeats over and over again:
A zeiger, a konke
A zeiger, a konke.
The zeiger is the town clock, and the konke is a horse-drawn tram that ferries passengers within the city and beyond it as far as the Zwierziniec forest. ‘You see’, father remarks triumphantly, ‘even then I was already a philosopher, and my first poem was about time and space.’
They lived on the edge of time and space, my ancestors, always on the verge of moving on, continually faced with the decision: do we stay, persist, take root within this kingdom, or do we take to the road again? Perhaps it is safer, greener, beyond the next river, over the next mountain-range, across yet another border? Often enough the choice was made for them, and they fled for their lives in the wake of expulsions, inquisitions, and massacres to seek a new place of refuge. At other times they were welcomed, initially, for the skills they had accumulated as wanderers; centuries on the move had made them masters of the ephemeral. They knew how to serve as middlemen, entrepreneurs, navigators and astronomers, court advisers and healers; even though their hearts longed for some soil to till.
So it was in Eastern Europe one millennium ago, when they began to arrive in flight from the Crusades. Later they came as guests of noblemen, who invited them to settle in their fiefdoms to become conduits between aristocrat and peasant, town and countryside. They traded as pedlars and merchants, transformed forests into slabs of timber, and shaped the timber into expanding towns, where they could set up workshops to weave, sew, hammer, cut, and shape future destinies.
Towns and villages sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Over the centuries they expanded in all directions: north to the shores of the Baltic Sea; south into the Carpathian Ranges and towards the Black Sea; west into obscure pockets of the Austro-Hungarian empire; and east, deep into Czarist Russia, beyond the banks of the River Dnieper. Settlements emerged as far and wide as the horizon and shifting foreign borders would permit them.
Yet at no time were these communities entirely secure. Arbitrarily, a charter or privileges they had been granted could be repealed, and their function, place of residence, and status redefined. There was always the threat of a sudden whirlwind, a madman on the rampage full of drink and misdirected rage, inciting the mob to join in and take out its frenzy on these peculiar people who had settled among them with their private God and the countless prayer-houses in which they worshipped Him.
So they maintained their talent for movement, travelling within the prescribed boundaries as itinerants, eking out a living from limited opportunities. Foremost among them, or at least this is how I once loved to imagine it, were the troubadours, storytellers, cantors, and bands of Klesmorim who toured obscure hamlets trading tales for a meal, songs for a drink. Wandering preachers, scribes, scholars, and wonder workers exchanged Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures, amulets, and talismans for precious roubles and zlotys to send home to their impoverished families. Their gifts and messages were borne along dusty roads and country paths by horse-drawn wagons. ‘We will return soon’, they wrote, ‘by spring, in time for Passover; or by autumn, for Rosh Hashonah and the Days of Awe.’ Sometimes they would break beyond the limits completely to steal over the horizon, murmuring: ‘Enough! It is time to find a new haven with greener pastures and the possibility of redemption.’
When, as a child, I had my first intimations of these ancestral wanderings, I saw them initially as a romance. I imagined myself the descendant of Gypsies and nomads. I tried to retrace their steps. I would catch glimpses of footprints and hooves etched in mud and dust within the pages of Yiddish novels that I read voraciously. My interest waxed and waned, and sometimes the footprints would peter out. Old volumes I found in the recesses of forgotten corners in our house would revive my flagging interest with an unexpected photograph of a forefather walking absentmindedly through a village, crooked cottages visible in the background, cobblestones underfoot. They drew me, these volumes, in spite of myself, back to the search.
One particular page stood out. In the wake of the Annihilation, the survivors had assembled photos, snatches of history, glimpses of what had been until so recently their beloved hometown. They did it in haste, as if building a moat against the ravages of memory loss. Within six years it was published, in New York: a massive volume encased between hard covers of dark crimson on which were embossed, in gold lettering, in Yiddish on the right-hand side and English on the left, the words, ‘Bialystok — Photo Album of a Renowned City and Its Jews the World Over’. Copies were sent to countries around the entire globe, to every corner where Bialystoker had fled and recreated their lives.
A random flip of the pages revealed scenes of a thriving metropolis and its citizens, both prominent and obscure. Other more faded photos and paintings depicted an era when Bialystok was merely a village enclosed by field and forest. But the pages could just as easily fall upon images of ruin and desolation, with buildings aflame or reduced to rubble. Then there was one particular page: after I discovered it I would always turn to it first, skimming over the ruins, not quite seeing or allowing myself to focus fully upon them. Recently I returned to that page which had once held me so captivated; and even though it was years since I had last seen them, the images retained their haunting quality and hinted at mysteries I had not quite penetrated.
There are five photos under the heading, ‘Memorable Bialystoker Characters’. Above, to the left, stands Yankel the Organ-Grinder, holding aloft a wooden box from which a parrot is drawing out a lucky envelope with its beak. They are in a market-square surrounded by a crowd watching this poor man’s lottery. Yankel’s hair is white, as too are his ample beard and moustache. He has the bearing of a fierce patriarch, a communal elder rather than a pedlar of cheap dreams.
Alongside Yankel, to the right, is a photo with the caption: A Bialystoker urchin from the Chanaykes’. Wrapped in a ragged overcoat, he leans against a timber door, clutching a cigarette to his mouth. He squints at the camera defiantly from beneath a peaked cap that perches crookedly on his head — a little rascal from the alleys of the neighbourhood where my mother once lived.
On the lower half of the page there are three passport-size photos. One of them remains as sinister today as it appeared when I first saw it and began to realise that, at a certain point, the romance wore thin and there were darker forces that could obliterate it. On the face of the ‘Boy Layser’, we are informed, the anti-Semite Dr Granowski had burned the words ‘ganev’, ‘dieb’, and ‘wor’ — all meaning ‘thief’. The words can be seen clearly, tattooed several inches high, one plastered across the forehead, one etched into each cheek. This incident took place in 1888. Almost a century later the face of Layser stares out, frozen and trapped within a square-inch prison that bears witness to the day he had been irreversibly branded and bound to his fate.
For relief from the intensity of Layser’s gaze, I would turn my attention to the photo of Faivel Lilliput. A turban wrapped around his head, a white robe draped over his shoulders, a hand held against his chest in a Napoleonic gesture — Faivel was a dwarf, a circus performer, and a distributor of theatre placards throughout Bialystok.
I knew Faivel. In the 1950s he resurfaced in Melbourne. His inflated head, muscular shoulders, and rolling gait were a familiar sight. He seemed to be everywhere: a jester at weddings; a guest at circumcisions; a mourner at funerals; an odd-job man in the run-down houses of newly arrived immigrants. He loved to play pranks and always put aside time to play with us, the children, as we darted about the communal functions that our parents often attended. He played with the abandon of someone who had long ago resigned himself to having no children of his own. And besides, he was our size, and saw the world from our perspective. He taught us how to mimic the gestures and antics of the grown-ups who towered above us, and to caricature their endless speeches. As my father used to say of him: even where he is not sown, he also manages to grow.
The fifth image is of an elderly man, balding at the temples, his beard neatly trimmed. He wears a white shirt, tie, and black jacket. The most striking family resemblance can be seen in the ears. I hated having the short-back-and-sides haircuts that were forced upon me as a child, because they exposed my big ears and made me look like a monkey. The fifth ‘memorable character’ in the honoured company of Yankel the Organ-Grinder, the Urchin from the Slums, Faivel Lilliput the Circus Dwarf, and the Tattooed Boy Layser, is my paternal grandfather, Bishke Zabludowski — who, as the caption informs us, was the first newsboy in Bialystok and ‘disseminated culture for over forty years’.
When Bialystoker gathered at parties and concerts I would be introduced as the grandson of Bishke Zabludowski. ‘We all knew him’, they would say. ‘A small man, with a red beard. He stood under the clock-tower, with piles of newspapers and journals. He was a familiar sight, trotting to and from his news-stand bent under the latest edition, his big ears sticking out to the sides.’ And they would lean over to tweak my ears, while I squirmed and wriggled to get away from my tormentors.
Bishke Zabludowski: the bearer of news, town crier, raconteur, contact man, his big ears tuned in to gossip both local and from abroad, a familiar figure, one of the most memorable sights in the streets of Bialystok. In the grand tradition, he was a true master of the ephemeral.
In the weeks before my departure I have a recurring dream, the same fragments repeated with slight variations, each one suffused with a similar feeling of unease.
I am travelling through a town. Friends who live there have invited me to inspect the offices of the security police. When we reach the entrance of the towering grey building I become anxious, and refuse to enter with them. After they emerge from the building some time later, they tell me it has been an interesting experience and that there is nothing to fear. Since the doors are still open I cannot resist the temptation and I enter.
There appears to be no one in sight as I descend the stairs. In the basement there is a man seated behind a desk. ‘You have come too late’, he informs me. There is still time for me to leave as easily as I have entered, and to ascend the stairs back into daylight. Yet I linger on, my curiosity aroused.
Unexpectedly, I am approached by several burly men who exude a sense of menace and brute strength. They escort me to a lower basement in which there are a number of interrogators seated behind a long table. Opened out in front of them are files within folders. They seem to know who I am. I realise now there is no escape; I am trapped in a cellar, hemmed in by guards. My inquisitors ask questions without a trace of feeling. They are clinical, detached. They want to know why I have come here, and it is clear they are not about to let me go.
Later I find myself in a prison cell. The guard is harsh and hostile. I envy him because, when he finishes work, he can go out into the sunlight while I will still be confined in a dark cell. I am overcome by a feeling of panic. Yet there is one saving grace. 1 have in my possession a large volume of stories about the Tzaddikim, the early Hasidic masters who, in the darkest of times, counselled their communities and tried to show them a way back to the light, to the source of Creation. I look forward to immersing myself in this book as a means of passing time and deriving some comfort while I am imprisoned. But on closer inspection I realise the book is moth-eaten, and that some of my fellow inmates have ripped out pages to use as cigarette paper.
I become aware that someone has smuggled themselves into the cell. It is a man who, in childhood, I used to know as the Partisan. He was a family friend who often visited us on Sunday afternoons. During the war years he had roamed the forests near Bialystok and fought in the Resistance. Many times he had narrowly escaped death and, eventually, in the wake of the Annihilation, he had made his way to Australia.
He passes me a note on which there are instructions about how to escape. But I cannot quite decipher the scribbled message.