Some not very kind people at home called ours ‘the sausage migration’. The Russian Jews leaving the Soviet Union in the late 1980s post Gorbachev’s reforms were, they said, moving up the food chain, escaping to the world of plenty. We were migrants without a cause, in pursuit of nothing more than material freedom; chasing sausages, if you like. There were other equally ungenerous statements made in our direction, most more or less comparing us to rats fleeing a sinking ship, the first ones onto the dry shore.
 
Not long before we left in December 1989 I got slapped with the rat insult. Somewhat unexpectedly, it came from the mouth of a young man I knew well, one-third of the gloriously gifted and didactic triplets known to their friends simply as ‘the Brothers’. From the tender age of seven, the Brothers and I spewed forth poetry together at the same literary club based at Kharkov’s Palace of Pioneers. I cannot tell you with conviction if the boys were any good, but I was definitely hopeless. The proof is in the pages of overwritten, try-hard poems that recently fell out of my teenage diary.
 
I cannot remember which of the Brothers it was who saw me walking around, immersed in my Walkman. Whoever it was, he pulled one earphone out to hear what sort of music I seemed so lost in, got an earful of an explanation about the number of consonants in the English language, and understood just about everything in that very instant. In preparation for our unadvertised departure, we were studying English like mad, day and night. Our friends, who were already in Australia and thus painfully capable of assessing the hopelessness of their language endowments, would scream down the phone receiver at least once a week, Eat with an English teacher, sleep with an English teacher, go to the toilet with an English teacher.
 
I do not doubt that the Brother spoke more in jest than in judgement, but by that stage all the rat stuff was very familiar and so was the snake brew that would generally inspire it. The brew could contain just about everything—envy, patriotism, bitterness, idealism, self-deprecation and, last but never least, good hearty anti-Semitism. Not the stuff of pogroms, but plain, no-frills anti-Semitism with its vision of Jews and their hidden pots of gold and their hidden plots of greener pastures. Just a few years after my family’s desertion, the Brothers’ half-Jewish family fled the ship too, escaping to Israel—another mighty and arguably no less leaking vessel.
 
You would think that we had received enough insults, let these people be, but we should not forget those delivered by Anna Marie, the proprietor of a small guesthouse in a tiny town on the border of Austria and what was still, in the winter of 1990, Czechoslovakia. It was to her guesthouse that a bunch of clueless migrants, my parents, my sister and I included, were allocated on our arrival. It was Anna Marie who, after a few days of mutually unhappy cohabitation, presented us with a poster in big bold letters that read, ‘THIS IS NOT HORSES STABLE’, meaning this is not a pigsty, clean up your shit, you dirty revolting Eastern Europeans. This was addressed to all of us, of course, including my mother, who is the tidiest person, in a non-pathological sense, I have ever known. For Anna Marie, we were all Russiche swine contaminating her pretty, clean guesthouse with our endless suitcases, ugly foreign words always spoken too loudly, foul smells and desperation, to say nothing about those nasty migrant habits of, say, playing chess and drinking vodka (not necessarily at the same time). There were only thirty of us in all, but to her we were wild hordes from the East—pillaging, vandalising, threatening the very fabric of her existence. Of course, if you decided to compare, just for the hell of it, Anna Marie’s level of education and cultural development with ours, it was our Austrian hostess who was likely to emerge as a wild Tartar, a barbarian on the loose. But we were migrants, which meant that there would be no comparison. Anna Marie knew beyond any reasonable doubt who we were and where we belonged.
 
And so a rather sad picture emerges. We were rats in search of sausage havens and half-horses, half-pigs (if you take Anna-Marie’s word for it) but never eagles or something magnificent or noble. We rolled in our shit, never soared high in the atmosphere. This is symptomatic. Take all the classical, noble stories of exile—there are no rats in them. Proud and defiant lions are driven away from their rightful domains. Schools of fish are made to move upstream or disperse altogether, but rats, they are in a different category. They may be consummate survivors but, as a rule, the rat’s ability to endure inspires deep contempt or, worse still, a measure of disgust. During my not infrequent moments of self-righteousness, I wonder how one of the most gruelling and confronting experiences a human being can live through can be treated with such easy contempt and made to seem obscenely trivial, even cowardly. I am always amazed by people who feel entitled to separate the wheat from the chaff—labour with an oepidural: coward; grieving the death of a partner for too long: sissy; leaving a country in crisis: traitor.
 
To Anna Marie and all the good citizens of Western Europe who felt distinctly squeamish and unsettled when the floodgates of Eastern Europe were opened with a bang at the end of 1989, and who, in turn, are not so dissimilar to all the Australians on permanent stand-by for an imminent Asian invasion, I am really sorry. You find a gorgeous, serene meadow abundant with berries and sun, a pristine picnic place that is all yours, hallelujah. And then, all of a sudden, a huge crowd descends on your oasis, bringing with them two-dollar paper cups and trance music and leaving behind a trail of still smouldering cigarette butts, and that’s it—the fairytale is over. Your picnic place is now just like any other dump down the road, and it is undeniably sad, infuriating even. You may understand that these uncouth people had nowhere to go, you may even believe that they, just like you, ultimately have the same picnic rights, but why, oh why, did they have to choose your blessed little place?
 
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