Cafe Scheherazade

by Arnold Zable

  ‘This was also my father's thinking. This is what he told me when I returned to Vilna, weeks later. By then, as he had predicted, the Red Army occupied the city. As in Kiev, two decades earlier, the buildings were draped in red banners, the streets festooned with red flags. My father was about to flee Vilna, but when he saw the Bolsheviks marching through the streets he changed his mind. Surely they would form a united front. After all, they were all revolutionaries, united in a common cause. After all, he had done time in Siberia, on the frozen shores of Lake Baikal.’

  Avram strokes his chin, then brushes a hand across his eyes. He sees armies on the march, villages ablaze. He sees the clash of dictators, the clash of ideas, and the sprouting of tears. The roads of Europe were littered with betrayals. Avram recalls the fierce arguments between Bund comrades. Anna Rosenthal was the leader of the Vilna Bund at the time. ‘The same legendary Anna who had participated in the “Romanov uprising” of 1904, in eastern Siberia,’ Avram tells me, with his customary gleam of pride.

  ‘Avramel? Where are you taking us now?’ interrupts Masha. ‘This is another story.’

  ‘Yes, it is another story,’ Avram replies. ‘But it is important that Martin understands Anna Rosenthal was a woman of great courage, with an honourable past. Someone who would not let down her friends; a woman who, in Tsarist times, had spent years in Siberian jails. Yet it was the same Anna Rosenthal who, just after the Bolsheviks marched into Vilna, went to the offices of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and supplied them with lists of Bund members. She did it in good faith. They were allies, the police assured her. They required the names and addresses so that they could be contacted in times of need. Even then we were still naive.

  ‘A week later, Anna was arrested, as too were many of her comrades. My father was forewarned. A friend had seen his name on the police lists. His arrest was imminent. His comrades urged him to leave with them, immediately.

  ‘“Me? Yankel Zeleznikow? Arrested by the Bolsheviks?” father replied. “So what! I am not afraid of them.”

  ‘He stayed put. And they came at midnight to our apartment on Benedictinski 4, in the old quarters of Vilna. This had been our home for the past ten years, our one bit of security after a lifetime on the run. Mother loved the apartment. It was a three-storey building and we lived on the ground floor. We even had a mahogany piano. My sister Basia was a concert pianist. She had graduated from the Vilna conservatory. Music was in the family. After all, Avram Stock, my mother's father, was once a fiddler, a lifelong player in a klezmer band.

  ‘Have I told you this story? My mother had a brother called Jonah, who also played the violin; he was a member of the Leningrad symphony orchestra, but he too disappeared during the Stalinist purges. Sooner or later, they all disappeared.’

  ‘Avramel,’ interrupts Masha, ‘where in this bitter world are you taking us now? Please, concentrate at least for a moment on Benedictinski 4.’

  ‘Yes, Benedictinski 4. I grew up with interesting neighbours. In the apartment opposite ours lived Reb Chaim Ozer Grodzinski. The rooms served as the Beth Din, Reb Ozer's rabbinical court. For years they had flocked to him, the believers, to receive his blessings, to sign marriage papers, arrange divorces, resolve squabbles. Reb Ozer sat day after day in a black caftan, stroking his white beard. He would sway from side to side whilst the litigants argued their case.

  ‘He once called upon my father, even though Yankel was an avowed non-believer. This particular case could not be decided by rabbinical law, Reb Ozer told him. It required the help of someone well-versed in the laws of economics, and the demands of the secular world. Yankel was brought in to advise.

  ‘The dispute concerned a factory owner and a worker who claimed he had not been adequately paid. It was a difficult case to decide. Since World War I, Vilna had become a city of great poverty. Beggars wandered the streets in packs. Children ran about in bare feet. The alleys were crowded with hovels where whole families slept on a single mattress or a pile of sacks.

  ‘When Poland absorbed the city in 1920, it was cut off from its pre-war markets in Russia and in countries by the Baltic Sea. So, when it came to manufacturing, there was little money for either owner or worker.’

  ‘Avramel!’

  ‘Masha, loz op! It is important that Martin should know that Vilna was also a city of paupers. This is why there were so many peddlers, selling their rags on its poorer streets. This is why there were so many smugglers and black marketeers. Have I told you this story? There was a man whom everyone called Rasputin. No one seemed to know his real name. He was a giant of a man, with a long black beard, and an unkempt mane of wild hair. He could always be found in Wolfke's, drinking in the outer saloon.

  ‘Like his namesake he was surrounded by many women. He ruled over them like a king. He was not a pimp, but a prince among beggars. In exchange for looking after them, the women would give him a cut of their earnings.

  ‘Rasputin's women roamed the Jewish quarters from sunrise until dusk. Each woman had her territory, her assigned beat. They would go from house to house, through every alley, and, whether you gave them a donation or not, they would always leave you with the same blessing: May you have, and may you give.

  ‘“So why the same blessing?” my father once asked him.

  ‘“Ah! It is a blessing with two very different meanings,” Rasputin replied. “If you are one of the givers, we bless you so that you should have more, and therefore be able to give more. And if you do not give, we bless you to have the good fortune to be sick, and be condemned to give out groans.”’

  ‘Tell Martin the story of your father's arrest,’ exclaims Masha, ‘or we will go insane.’

  ‘They came at midnight,’ murmurs Avram, ‘the secret police. They searched our apartment. They interrogated my mother. They arrested my father. But he was well prepared. After all, he was a seasoned revolutionary. He had his overnight bag packed with essentials. He would be back within weeks, he assured us.

  ‘I accompanied him to jail. My father was a heavy smoker. I slipped him several packets of cigarettes. He grasped my hands, kissed me goodbye, and disappeared through the prison gates. I never saw him again.

  ‘Over the years we received reports. Glimpses. Crumbs of information from former comrades who had shared a cell, a prison yard. He had been sighted in a Siberian camp. He had been interrogated by the secret police. He had been beaten and severely bashed. The NKVD wanted him to write a book exposing the false ideals of the Bund. He had refused, so he remained in jail.

  ‘Stalin was like the tsars of old. It was the same bitter wine, despite the new red bottles. Like Uncle Jonah, the fiddler, my father vanished in the labour camps of Siberia. So many vanished without trace.’

  ‘My family did survive Siberia,’ says Masha.

  Until now, she has deferred to Avram's monologue. She has sat by his side, alert to his every word. ‘Compared to Avram, I led a sheltered life,’ she adds. ‘Compared to Avram, my story is trivial. Compared to those who remained in Lithuania and Poland, we spent the war years in paradise. For many years, I thought my story was not worth telling.’

  I glance at the glowing lamps, the ashtrays, the white serviettes laid out in readiness for the evening meal. I take in the counter display of the day's cakes: almond rings and apple-strudel, marzipan sticks and nougat delight. Behind the counter, the mirrored backdrop reflects a steady procession of customers disappearing into the St Kilda night. These are the touchstones, the props to a tale of a journey towards the Empire of the White Bears. A journey which began on a sunlit autumn day in September 1939.

  They ran in fear. They ran for their lives. Twelve-year-old Masha, her mother, her younger sister and brother, from the Polish city of Sosnowiec. For the first of many times they were refugees, just four among the thousands who choked the single road which led out of town.

  ‘Father had told us to run,’ says Masha, ‘and make our way to Siedlce, a shtetl hundreds of kilometres north-east of Sosnowiec. My parents, J
osef and Yohevets Frydman, were born and raised in Siedlce. They were also Bundists. In the 1920s they had been sent to Sosnowiec to organise trade unions. Sosnowiec was a city in the south-west, and Siedlce was to be a stepping stone to the east, to the River Bug, the new border between Russia and Poland.

  ‘Grandfather Hershl Frydman was a rabbi, a follower of the Bialer Hasidim. He spent his days in a shtiebele, a tiny prayer house in Siedlce, where he studied and taught Torah. He was known as Hershl “Mruk”, the brooder, because he did not talk very much. He was upset with his four children. All of them had forsaken their religion. All had become trade unionists and revolutionaries. One of his daughters was a communist. She rose through the ranks to become the party secretary in Siedlce. She was a passionate woman. I was impressed by her independence. I liked the straightforward way she dealt with people. I wanted to be like her.

  ‘And my father was also a renegade. When he was a young man he would deliberately go to the Siedlce synagogue, his head bared, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, a day of fasting and repentance; and he would stand on the steps, and eat; and my bubbe would try to keep the peace.

  ‘“Yossel, please, if you must eat, can't you go and eat somewhere else,” she would plead. She was a gentle woman. She had reared twelve children of whom only four survived. In a crisis she was always there, always ready to provide shelter, a warm meal, a clean bed.

  ‘In September 1939 we ran for Siedlce, for the comfort of our bubbe and zeide. We ran until we were surrounded, in a field. Everything was burning. Even the trees were on fire. But because we were children the German soldiers spared us. We returned to Sosnowiec. It was the first of many miracles.

  ‘Two weeks later we set out again, this time by train, for Warsaw. Poland was under siege. I was afraid. And I was excited. I had been entrusted with a mission. Father told me to take charge. Mother remained silent because her Polish was heavily accented. She could be easily identified as a Jew. I was to do the talking. I loved the responsibility. I felt like an adult.

  ‘In Warsaw we boarded a horse-drawn cart and continued our journey east. I was very proud of myself when we arrived in Siedlce. I had accomplished my mission.

  ‘Father joined us one month later. He walked all the way from Sosnowiec. He walked by night, and hid by day. He walked in a hurry. He wanted only to move east, away from the advancing terror. After he arrived safely in Siedlce, he did not stop. He took the four of us under his wing and we set out for the east, for the safety of the Soviet empire.

  ‘On New Year's Eve, we arrived at the border, on the banks of the River Bug. The water was frozen over. On the first day of 1940, we walked across the ice into Russia. In broad daylight. The entire family. I will never forget it. I still dream about it. The sun was shining. The snow was high. It dripped from the skies. It hung from the trees. It clung to our clothes, while from afar there drifted the voices of Russian soldiers on patrol.

  ‘They were singing a folk song. I can still hear it now, the harmony, the voices floating in the air. Anyone who has lived in Russia knows this song.’ And Masha finds her way back to the words, which she recites haltingly, without the melody, in fragments of barely remembered verse:

  ‘The apple and pear trees have blossomed;

  The mist on the river has gone.

  Katyusha has left for the riverbank,

  To sing of the soldier she loves.

  Oh heart-felt song of my longing,

  Fly far on the rays of the sun.

  Katyusha will cherish her precious love

  Until her lover from war shall return.’

  They walked for their lives. They walked with rucksacks on their backs. They walked until Masha's ten-year-old brother, Lonka, refused to go on. They stood in no man's land, between contending empires. The sun shone, the snow twinkled, the strains of a Russian folk song wafted upon a breeze.

  Lonka sat on the ice and did not move. His parents pleaded. They threatened. They tugged at his arms. They were visible targets, fully exposed. They begged him, with mounting panic, until at last he allowed them to drag him back onto his feet.

  They walked on through a wonderland engulfed in mist. They walked to the beat of their hearts, towards the beckoning east. They moved as fast as the ice would allow them. When they finally reached the opposite bank, they kissed the frozen earth. And when they came upon the patrol of Red Army soldiers, Josef Frydman bent down and kissed the commander's feet.

  ‘We settled in the border town of Lutzk,’ Masha continues. ‘But our freedom was short-lived. The Soviet police came to our home, in the middle of the night. They battered the doors with batons and rifle butts. “Bistro! Bistro!” they screamed. “Bistro! Bistro! You have twenty minutes to pack. Bistro! Bistro!”’

  ‘Bistro is a Russian word which was adapted by the French,’ interrupts Avram. Such details fascinate him. ‘When the victorious Russians came to Paris after the defeat of Napoleon, they would walk into restaurants and demand: “Bistro! Bistro! Quickly! Quickly! We want to eat. We are hungry; and we are busy. So make it quick.” Because of this, bistro came to mean a place for a snack. Not like our Scheherazade where you can sit all afternoon over one cup of coffee.’

  ‘Avramel, let me tell my story,’ insists Masha. ‘As I was saying, we had to be quick. We grabbed what we could. Clothes. Photos. Mementos. We descended into the street. “Bistro! Bistro!” We marched through the darkness, at gunpoint. We were “unwanted elements”, nobodies. We were directed into cattle trucks. Fifty or so to a carriage. It all happened so quickly. We did not know where we were being taken. We had lost control over our fate.’

  This is a tale of maps, both old and new. Maps with shifting borders, obsolete before the ink could dry. Maps that created bands of nomads, stateless refugees. Maps criss-crossed by trains shunting their cargoes of uprooted wanderers thousands of kilometres east, on a nine-week journey, over glacial plains and snow-capped ranges, through white nights and broken days, an interminable journey that came to an abrupt halt at a remote station.

  Taiga forests swayed in the distance; fields of snow extended to the horizon; and in the foreground stood the wooden huts and dormitories of a pasholik, a desolate labour camp.

  Masha recalls the welcoming speech of the camp commander. And his final words: ‘You will get used to it. And if you don't, you will slowly die, like dogs.’

  Hundreds did die like dogs, from disease and despair, from hunger and unbearable cold, or from the sheer vastness, from the blinding whiteness of snow. Prisoners would deliberately walk out into the darkness, and vanish. It was as if they had never existed. Or they would be brought back, days later, frozen to death, their rigid corpses a reminder to the living that they were ciphers within a void.

  The Frydmans were among those who did get used to it. Josef was assigned to a work brigade that felled trees and hauled timber. He disappeared into the forests with his fellow workers in the pre-dawn gloom, and returned exhausted, long after dark.

  By day, Masha worked in the communal kitchen and, late at night, as the weary camp inmates slept, she would steal out with little Lonka, in search of potatoes. They dug them out with their gloved hands, from beneath the snow. As they worked they could hear the howling of wolves.

  A settlement in Siberia. It was harsh. It was strangely beautiful. It was a wilderness. The prisoners inhaled ice. They were infested with lice. On fatigue-laced summer evenings, the shadows played over barren steppes. A Polish countess taught the young girls how to dance. She taught Masha the polka and czardas. She sewed dresses for her students and they performed the dances in a pasholik concert.

  Masha enrolled in the village school. She trudged seven kilometres through snow every morning and afternoon. She walked in a world of silence, broken by sudden gusts of wind. She trekked through a world of white upon white. A pasholik in Siberia. The coming of age of a young girl. It was harsh. It was strangely beautiful. It was a wilderness.

  ‘About this period alone, you could write a b
ook,’ says Masha.

  And, not for the first time, I am overcome by an uneasy feeling that I am stranded in the snows of Siberia; trapped at a table in the back room of a cafe called Scheherazade. In late September 1941, after almost two years of incarceration, the inmates were assembled by the pasholik commander to be informed they were now free. Two months earlier, a deal had been brokered in London between the Soviets and the Polish government-in-exile. The Red empire was now at war with the Third Reich. Polish citizens on the run in Russia were now regarded as allies rather than slaves.

  Yet Masha does not recall a sense of celebration. She cannot recall a moment of departure, a sense of ending. The journey was far from over. All that had changed was the direction.

  Move south, the freed prisoners reasoned. Move south, towards the sun, away from the northern winds. They gathered on railway platforms, sat in crowded waiting rooms. They slept on wooden benches. They dozed on sackcloth and stone floors. And waited. Endlessly they waited for the next train south. This was the thought that obsessed them: to reach the sun.

  And when, at last, a place was secured, in a cattle wagon, the Frydmans were one family among thousands. They acquired the skill of sleeping on their feet. They learnt to leap out of slowing carriages by provincial stations to dash for water. They squatted on train tracks, or stood in dark corners to relieve themselves. They mastered the delicate art of defecating from the sides of moving wagons. And they clung to their simple goal: to move south. To Tashkent, ‘the city of bread’. To Alma-Ata, the ‘mother of apples’. Perhaps to Bukhara, ‘the city of mosques’. To the Asiatic republics. To the sunlit extremities of an empire.

  At long last they began to feel the changing winds, the scent of breezes which hinted at weightless days. At last they could fling off the burden of heavy clothes. The breezes flowed through the wagon doors and allowed them a brief respite.

  The Frydmans alighted in Merke, a hamlet in southern Kazakhstan. There was work here, they had heard on the refugee grapevine. On the outskirts of the hamlet stood a sugar refinery and an enclave of factories. The men-folk had been drafted to fight in distant wars. Newcomers were welcomed through the factory doors.