The Fig Tree Read Free

to protect them from sudden downpours, and arranged warped boards of three-ply to shield them from winter squalls. One forget-me-not did bloom, on the day you died. It is still alive, days later, small and blue; like you in physical stature, like you in its contained radiance. Yet again, it seems, your eccentric devices have worked.
    Everywhere, throughout the house, I come across them: your many contrivances and innovations. You could never leave things as they were. You were driven to improvise. When I gave you a dish rack, you converted it into a toolbox. Instead of buying new carpet for the dining room, you scoured opportunity shops for worn rugs. Over the years the conflicting patterns of layers of rugs did, I must admit, have a certain chaotic appeal. So it was with the kitchen linoleum, to which you added strip upon strip to create an erratic patchwork in varying degrees of wear. Your mind was forever churning with novel ways of creating order out of chaos, a wholeness out of fragments; and in time I came to understand that it could not be otherwise for someone with such a fractured past.
    Fragments, everywhere. Above all, here—in the bedroom, your study, your sunlit retreat. I am surrounded by your fragments. Overwhelmed by them. This is my inheritance, your countless jottings in Yiddish, with scatterings of English, Hebrew, Polish, Russian; your rich overflow of aphorisms, curses, anecdotes, rewrites of favourite poems; and your innumerable reflections on time and space, energy and entropy, scribbled on scraps of paper, on the backs of used envelopes, in the margins of the journals and books which you brought from the old world—books which you were continually rebinding, rereading, reinterpreting.
    â€˜Time is running out,’ you often exclaimed over these past few years. You sensed death was imminent. You contrived calendars on which you marked the passing of days. You wrote poems that measured the ticking of a clock. You hurried towards oblivion, trotting on your hardened little legs, head held high, body erect, heart straining to its limits, before returning home afresh to your rickety desk to sort out more papers.
    Barely one pile was disposed of before another was waiting to be raked up and filed away in folders made from recycled cardboard. These files are all around me now: on the marble mantelpiece, in the fireplace, under the mattress, beneath the bed, in chests of drawers, on the dressing table, in cupboards, on the tops of cupboards, in cardboard boxes, on shelves contrived from pieces of timber.
    â€˜Little seed droppings,’ you called this mounting chaos just weeks ago. ‘Who knows? Something may come of them.’
    Let me tell you a story. Two tales, in fact. We might call one of them ‘The Poetic Journey of Meier Zabludowski’. This is the name he used to sign his earliest poems. The second is a story about a young Chinese immigrant we shall call—for he would rather not have his name revealed—Wang Liu. Our two heroes were born worlds apart, and decades removed in time. Yet their tales are intimately connected. I cannot tell the one without adding the other.
    Born in the White Russian city of Bialystok, December 1905, my father died in July 1992. He was eighty-six years old. His life spanned almost an entire century, and two continents at opposite ends of the globe. At the time of his birth, Bialystok was a part of the Tsarist empire, under the rule of Nicholas II, emperor of all the Russias. A decade later it was occupied by the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm. By 1920, Bialystok was an integral part of the newly formed Republic of Poland. This is how it has always been, as former empires disintegrate into a chaotic patchwork of rival tribes, and maps dissolve overnight in rivers of blood.
    This is how Meier would have put it because verse was his great passion. As a child, he became infatuated with that outpouring of creativity called Yiddish literature. Above all,