The Mascot

PART I

1.
  
THIS IS ALL THAT I KNOW

2.
  
THE HEMORRHAGE

3.
  
EARTH TREMORS

4.
  
INTERROGATED

5.
  
THE SEDUCTION

6.
  
THE DZENIS FAMILY

7.
  
THE VOLHOV SWAMPS

8.
  
THE CHOCOLATE SOLDIER

9.
  
JUDGMENT

10.
  
THE GROUND SHIFTS

11.
  
CAST ADRIFT

12.
  
OXFORD

13.
  
ELLI

PART II

14.
  
HOME, AGAIN

15.
  
ESCAPE FROM RIGA

16.
  
TO FREEDOM

17.
  
THE AFFIDAVIT

18.
  
NO ESCAPE

19.
  
STOCKHOLM

20.
  
FEAR

21.
  
ALICE

22.
  
THE LETTER

23.
  
NIGHTMARES

24.
  
A TELEGRAM

PART III

25.
  
OXFORD

26.
  
KOIDANOV

27.
  
CONNECTIONS

28.
  
SOLOMON AND VOLODYA

29.
  
RIGA

30.
  
CARNIKAVA

31.
  
THE FILM

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

MAPS

T
he story of my father, the mascot, is a true one. In order to protect the privacy of some of the individuals and organizations I encountered during my research over the years, I have altered various names and identifying details.

I have also condensed the chronology of my research in order to enhance the narrative flow of the book, but the actual sequence of events remains true and accurate. I beg my readers' indulgence of these alterations, for they were made with their reading pleasure in mind.

In addition, there are various accounts of the Second World War, and, almost inevitably perhaps, discrepancies among historians' versions of certain incidents in matters such as dates, locations, and the troops involved. An important case in point is the precise date of the Slonim massacre, which still remains unclear, as does whether my father witnessed the massacre, as reflected in this book. I also encountered inconsistencies in the recollections of some individuals who were direct witnesses to the events. Furthermore, there were considerable variations in the spelling of place-names. In the interest of clarity and consistency, I have adhered to one version at all times.

I have done my best to navigate these discrepancies throughout.

I
f I'm ever asked, “What's your father like?” a simple answer always escapes me.

Even though I can look back on a lifetime spent in his company, I have never been able to take his measure: One part of him is a shy, brooding Russian peasant who shows a certain air of naïveté, if not gullibility, with strangers. Then there is another side: alert, highly gregarious, and astonishingly worldly.

His unexpected appearance on my doorstep in Oxford one May afternoon in 1997 left me more mystified than ever.

I was walking back to my digs, weighed down by books that I'd just bought at Blackwell's bookshop. I was looking forward to getting home and immersing myself in a new purchase, the door of my study closed to the world for several hours.

As I let myself in I noticed a scrap of paper that had been slipped under the door. It was the stub of a boarding pass for a flight from Melbourne. Written on its margin was “
OVER AT DAPHNES DAD
.”

I immediately recognized my father's handwriting: he wrote only in capital letters and without any punctuation. He had always formed his sentences like this; he'd grown up in eastern Europe during the Second World War and had had no formal schooling.

I was taken aback. I had spoken to my father on the phone only a couple of days earlier. He had been at home in Melbourne, watching television with my mother, and when I had asked how their week had been, all he would say was, “Oh, it's been the same as usual here, son. Nothing much happens in this neck of the woods.”

His tone had not altered in the slightest nor had his voice missed a beat when I asked what they were planning for the coming week: “No plans, really.”

At that moment a slight clicking sound indicated that he had just turned on the speakerphone so that my mother could join in the conversation. He did this every time I called.

The three of us chatted on the phone for some time about things that had happened during the past week in Oxford, where I was a research student. We touched upon my plans to visit Tokyo—where I'd be for about four months, conducting research on a
matsuri,
or ritual festival—in about a month's time.

My father didn't have much to say about this, so the conversation drifted into silence. While he and my mother were always supportive of my path in life, the intense connection I'd always felt toward the culture and history of Japan slightly baffled them: it had become something of a family legend that as a child I would insist on dressing up as a miniature samurai before going to the corner shop to buy the milk and bread.

I promised to call my parents again before my departure. Then, just as I was hanging up, I heard my father give a nervous little cough. This was often a sign that something was troubling him. I hesitated, but before I could ask him if all was well he had put the phone back on the hook. Throughout our conversation he'd given no other indication of the dramatic scenario that was forming in his mind.

My eyes fixed on the note again: “
OVER AT DAPHNES DAD
.” Although it had to be true, I still couldn't quite believe that my father was here, and I felt a rising unease. What was he doing here? Ever since I'd been a student at Oxford I'd wanted him and my mother to visit me. My mother had been keen to do so but had always been held back by my father's reluctance: he hadn't been back to Europe since leaving in 1949 and was adamant that he didn't have the slightest interest in returning.

“That's the past,” he'd insist fiercely, “there's nothing there for me. Australia's my home now.”

As I was growing up, he often made such assertions, but none of us, family or friends, ever gave them much thought. We never asked him why he felt this way, and he never volunteered any particular explanation. Just like him, we were absorbed in the business of living in the bright and healthy sunshine of the “lucky country,” as it was so often called.

I made my way over to Daphne's. Daphne was my elderly neighbor from across the street, and she must have been peeping through the curtains in her front room, because the door opened gently before I'd even knocked on it. She stood wide-eyed on her front step and pointed excitedly toward the back of her house. “It's your father!” she said, seemingly as astonished as I was. “But he seems to be nodding off,” she whispered. “Come in quietly.”

Daphne led me down the narrow hallway and opened the door to her living room. From the doorway I could see my father, his legs stretched out in front of him and his head resting against the wing of the chair so that his eyes were concealed from view. His arms were folded across the small brown case sitting on his lap.

I tiptoed farther into the room and whispered a thank-you to Daphne for taking my father in and looking after him. We'd been facing away from my father to avoid disturbing him. But from behind me I heard him stir, and I felt his eyes on me. I turned around. He had raised his head slightly and fixed his strong blue eyes on me with curiosity. I took in his familiar impish features: his arched eyebrows and his high and rosy cheeks gave him a permanently mischievous air. But I was struck by something else—it was as if I'd captured his image in a photograph and glimpsed an aura of sadness. But this quickly sank beneath the surface of his mobile features.

I can't pretend that I wasn't alarmed by his impetuousness, but his presence didn't entirely surprise me. Over the years, I'd become accustomed to his highly impulsive and quixotic nature. He often made decisions on the spur of the moment without much regard for our likes or dislikes.

“Marky!” my father exclaimed warmly.

“Dad?”

“Open your ears. Daphne offered you a drink.”

I wanted to start questioning my father there and then. But I didn't want to make a fuss in front of Daphne, who seemed to have sensed that I was thrown by my father's appearance. She cut in with her own effort to keep the atmosphere calm. “Let's have a beer. A Foster's,” she said cheerfully, then added, “mate!” That ubiquitous Aussie term of affection made my father and I both smile despite the fact that I rarely thought of myself as an Aussie. Not only was I not a blond, blue-eyed surfer boy, or a “footy” player, but my years in schools away from the sunburnt country had left my body with an academic pallor.

“To Melbourne!” Daphne toasted.

“To Melbourne,” my father responded with a sheepish grin in my direction.

It was early evening before we finally made our way back across the street. In the half-light I fumbled with the door key while my father waited patiently behind me, coughing.

The door open, I turned to help him. I reached down to the small, battered brown case beside him, but his hand shot out immediately, snatching the case from my grasp. “Let me take that,” he said emphatically.

He had always been protective of his case—it was an unstated rule that nobody apart from him should ever lay hands upon it. He took it with him everywhere, clasping it so closely under his arm it might have been grafted to his rib cage.

It was all he'd brought with him from Europe at the end of the Second World War. In it he carried his few meager belongings: mementos from his childhood in Russia and Latvia.

For as long as I could remember the case had been a feature of our family life. Although we knew that it contained photographs, documents, and other remnants of his past, none of us had ever been allowed to see inside it. Instead we'd have to wait until he decided to display its contents to us. My mother would sometimes chide him for his secretiveness, exclaiming, “For God's sake, Alex, you guard it as if it's Fort Knox! What have you got in there, the Crown Jewels?”

When he was at home, my father invariably kept the locked case in the bottom of his wardrobe, hidden beneath my Catholic mother's family Bible to give it extra and somewhat superstitious security. He kept the keys to the case in his pocket and out of the reach of me and my brothers, Martin and Andrew, at all times. Of course, his air of mystery gave the case an almost totemic power over our imaginations that was never more strongly felt than when my father decided to tell us a story from his past, using the case as a prop.

Once or twice a month, after my mother had done the dinner dishes and we had all settled down in front of the “telly,” absorbed in some police drama or thriller, my father would take up his position on the floor in front of the fireplace—regardless of the season—and my mother would sit in her armchair close to the hearth. It always seemed as if the deepening silence among us as we became absorbed in the “idiot box,” as my mother liked to call it, created in my father the urge to assert himself as the center of the household. He seemed to be tacitly saying, “I have a much better story to tell than the one you're watching now.”

He would become visibly restless, raising his head slightly as if he were straining to hear something. Then his eyes would begin to dart about the room, unfocused, as if he were staring into another world, quite spellbound by what he saw there. Above all, it was his slight, barely audible clearing of the throat, as if he were struggling to release his trapped voice, that would alert us all to what was coming.

He would rise from the floor and disappear from the room while we silently prepared ourselves for his return. With a nod from our mother, one of us would turn off the television. Even if we'd been on the point of learning who the villain was in
Homicide
or
Consider Your Verdict
—our favorites—we never uttered a word of protest. We were all much more riveted by what was coming.

If we were lucky, my mother would even pass us each a small bar of chocolate. Fidgeting and wiggling about on the couch, my brothers and I would wait impatiently for our father's return, case in hand, some moments later. He would place it gently on the floor in the center of the room. With a small flourish he would draw out a photograph or a document creased and frayed around the edges and yellow with age. Then he would abruptly close the lid on the case, placing the selected item on top.

Whatever he chose was used as a prop around which he would weave a tale about his life during the war or, more frequently, about his adventures on freight trains in the Australian outback or with a traveling circus in the 1950s. As the story unfolded, we would sit in rapt attention, licking our chocolate bars. From time to time he would reach back into the case to fetch another memento and would slowly turn it over as if doing a conjuring trick. Like a magician plucking one rabbit after another in quick, precisely timed succession from his hat, my father never had to lower his eyes to locate his next prop. He would draw out each one as if by divination. We were always enchanted by his stories and the artful way he related to his battered old case.

Apart from his love for eastern European foods, the case seemed to provide my father with his only connection to his past—the only one he seemed to want. From the moment he'd set foot on Australian soil in December 1949, my father had embarked with unabashed enthusiasm on his journey toward becoming an authentic Aussie—dinky-di—through and through. Quickly he came to believe he was one: for example, if someone cut him off when he was driving, he would curse the “bloody new Australian” driver, forgetting that he himself—cursing in broken English with his thick Russian accent—was pretty far removed from being “true blue” in the minds of many Anglos.

My father's love for Australia extended far beyond the footy, and it was rare that anything ever compared favorably to the place he had called home since his arrival as a refugee on board a ship called
Nelly.
He even carried a photo of the
Nelly
in his wallet as a measure of his attachment, five decades later, to the vessel that had ferried him away from war-torn Europe to the haven of Australia.

“From the moment they set foot in Australia,” he would say, “people are free to be who they are, without persecution, and to make something of themselves.” Then, raising his eyes to the heavens theatrically, he'd exclaim, “Why on earth would I want to go back to Russia? The poverty, the weather. God forbid! You'd have to be crazy!”

He would put himself forward as an example: “Look at me. If I'd not come to Australia I'd be stuck in a freezing field somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Russia, looking after pigs. Here, I've built up my own business.” His tone was not boastful but rather grateful. To him, his adopted country was the “best little place on earth.” I'd always admired my father's attitude, but it set him apart from many of my friends' immigrant parents, who would often complain about how much better life had been back in the mother country.

The outer western suburbs of Melbourne where I grew up were predominantly immigrant areas populated by Italian, Maltese, and Greek families, among others, and many of them seemed dominated by a longing to return to their homeland. They would cling tenaciously to their own language, even as it began to atrophy, and use just enough English to make themselves understood. They would surround themselves with clothing, foods, religions, and customs that helped keep their pre-émigré world alive.