Africa and Siberia

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Two letters this morning in the post: two letters from opposite ends of the earth. Two places that resonate in me: Africa and Siberia.

I open the Kenyan one first. The handwriting is familiar. It is from an old friend who wants me to come to Nairobi this year to visit him. Once you have been to Africa, he tells me, you always need to return. And for once, he is right. My visit to the Serengeti three years ago changed me irrevocably; and I long to go back.

Imagine a Pacific Ocean of grass that stretches in every direction to the horizon; a landscape innocent of buildings, with no memory, no history, no man-made objects, hardly any trees. Past and Future have no meaning here. Forgetfulness flows in the breeze over waves of liquid grass. Everything is new, fresh, a green page waiting to be written on. The vastness of the sky and the surface of the earth meet one another face to face and cheek to jowl. Here the earth draws out all the airy philosophies of men and demolishes them, levelling and smoothing them to the conformity of the flat unending plain. With nothing to hold onto, no object to focus upon, the mind abandons all hope of redemption through words and disappears like camphor into the midnight air. I have a burning need to return to the Serengeti.

I next turn my attention to the other letter with its array of Russian stamps. It is written in a small, almost illegible hand and begins: “Expensive Ryszard...." I love such deliciously bad English, so I read on. Someone in Siberia has found an article I wrote about the Gulag system and would like some information. The irony does not escape me.

For those of us from Eastern Europe, Siberia is not just a geographical area: it symbolizes the oppression of millions of innocent men and women who died of cold, hunger, exhaustion and sickness in the work-camps of the north. Many of them were sent to their deaths without even a pretence of legal process or trial. Its soil contains the ashes of generations of my own ancestors.

I was brought up on tales about Siberia. My mother was barely fifteen when Russian soldiers broke into her house one night, ordered her downstairs and told her to dress warmly for a long journey. Snow was falling. It was the night of 10th February 1940. They gave her fifteen minutes to gather together her belongings and say goodbye to her childhood. Cattle-trucks were waiting at the railway station to take her (along with her whole family) to the forced labour camps of northern Siberia. The ordeal cast a shadow over her whole life.

Two letters on the same day. Africa and Siberia. Two landscapes that resonate and define the Geography of my heart.

(Picture: Bardia Haddadi)