Cafe Scheherazade

by Arnold Zable

  They also feasted on the glukhar, a large bird that they prized for its ample flesh, and the ease with which it could be trapped, because it was believed to be deaf. They cleaned the bird and discarded the entrails at the periphery of the camp. Just after sunrise a member of the brigade stepped out of his hut into the path of a bear. It had been lured into the camp by the scent of the bird's remains. The worker ran back to the hut to rouse his companions.

  ‘Grab pots and pans. Grab whatever you can,’ advised the more experienced forest workers. They ran out screaming, pounding their makeshift drums. They stamped their feet on the ground. They waved their arms like windmills caught in a gale. The bear raised its head and lumbered away. This is what struck Laizer, the bear's composure. It did not run. It merely turned and strolled away.

  Just as unobtrusively, summer gave way to autumn. Mushrooms littered the earth. The undergrowth was a mess of lichens and rotting leaves. Laizer inhaled the cool aroma of damp foliage and decay. But there was little time to savour it. Ice-edged winds were a reminder, the forward scouts of impending gloom. The first frosts spread their veils over the forest floor. Laizer and his companions worked against time.

  Their most important autumn task was to fell trees, the keys to their survival. They provided fuel, timber for their log huts, and the building blocks for the towers. The men worked in pairs upon each tree, eight men to four trees. The first snows had begun to fall. Three of the trees tumbled towards the river over an incline, as planned. The fourth remained standing. Laizer approached it, struck an axe into the split, and levered the gap as he had been taught to do. His partner, a Ukrainian, stood behind him grasping a pole, at the ready, to push the tree on its way.

  Instead of falling towards the river the tree slipped off its cut and toppled backwards; at first slowly, mesmerising its assailants with its deceptive speed. Laizer was struck in the chest. His partner received a direct blow to the head and was instantly killed. Laizer was saved by the snow that cushioned his fall. He lay in bed for eight days, unable to move, and emerged condemned to feel the pain, every day, for the rest of his life.

  As for their second winter, it was the time to take stock. To hibernate, and prepare for the return of the light. When the night was clear the brigade worked by the glow of the moon. Frost clung to their faces. Each breath was bloated with snow. Perspiration turned to ice. They laboured in silence, broken only by a snatch of song, an anecdote. Or they discussed the exploits of their most loved workmate, Dobynda the Gypsy.

  ‘We all loved him, that no-good bastard. He was not afraid. He spoke the truth in his half-smiling and half-cynical way. He knew how to control his laughter, when he had to. It was the laughter of a man with lizards in his guts. When our overseers hurled mud at him, it would never stick. Nothing could touch him. He did float through each day without a care.

  ‘“Hey Dobynda, you are idling; work harder,” the foreman once warned.

  ‘“Why should I work harder,” Dobynda replied, “when you measure the soil with spades and the food with spoons? Now, if you would measure the food with spades and the soil with spoons, then I'd work faster than the devil.”’

  Laizer laughs. Sips his coffee. Stirs in another sugar.

  ‘Because of Dobynda I once ate more food in a day than I would eat for an entire month. He awoke me late at night. “Come,” he said. “It is Easter. Christ is rising. I can tell by the size of the moon. We should take advantage of his resurrection, his rebirth.”

  ‘We did steal out and make our way to the nearest village, fifteen kilometres away, by the light of the rising moon. We reached the village in the early morning. We knocked on every door and repeated the magic words: Christos Voskres. Christ has risen. And each villager, no matter how poor, gave us some food— a slice of black bread, a potato, a cucumber, a hard-boiled egg.

  ‘We left the village with our sacks full. We sat in the forest and filled our bellies until they ached. Never were two atheists so grateful for the rising of Christ as we were on that Easter day.’

  Laizer lapses into silence. The smile fades. His eyes are drained. The spell has broken. We are the last two diners left in the cafe. Our plates are strewn with crumpled napkins, our coffee cups down to the dregs. The tables are littered with ashtrays full of blackened butts. The night manager is checking the books, the waitresses are stacking the chairs, dimming the lights.

  ‘Genug. Enough of these grandmother's tales,’ quips Laizer. ‘Besides, you no-good bastard, you idle scribbler, you should have enough stories now for an entire encyclopaedia of the world's follies and woes.’

  Laizer has come to know this fragment of bayside suburb well. He has lived here longer now than any other place he has ever been; and its lack of symmetry suits him. The streets do not run to a simple grid. The sea does not allow it. The foreshore bends to the bay. The Esplanade curves with the coastline. The thoroughfares are interwoven like lace.

  The sea has darned the lace; pulled it into its natural shapes. Only later did the town-planners come and impose their own more rigid order as best they could. They followed the contours of their minds' eyes, which were guided by the cities of their youth. Later still came the new immigrants, from all corners of the earth. They recreated their remembrances, their cravings, their Scheherazades.

  Yet Laizer walks these streets as if they do not exist. He moves in and out of his parallel universes, pursued by the whispers of obstinate ghosts. He wanders a world of mirages. He walks the tracks of Siberia.

  When Laizer and I next meet, at the appointed hour, I sense a new urgency. It can be heard in the tone of his voice, in the way he fumbles for words. It can be detected in the way he clasps his elbows, winds his arms about himself, or lifts them up in a hopeless gesture. I feel the limits of my craft, the limits of what words can convey; and I am driven by an urge to enter into Laizer's parallel worlds with him, hand-in-hand; to burst beyond the walls of the cafe, beyond the streets of St Kilda, into the images he is trying to create.

  ‘Words cannot describe those months on the tracks of Siberia,’ Laizer says. ‘We did live in a world without an end. The paths wound their way into infinity. I was a nothing in an indifferent machine.

  ‘That is the word I am looking for: indifference. This is what was so brutal about Siberia, the prison in Lvov, those wasted years in Vorkuta. This is what was so cruel about every nachalnik, every camp commandant, party boss, or interrogator I faced: their indifference. And their contempt. They did not put any value on your life.

  ‘Do you know what this means, when no one cares? When no one knows who you are? When there is no longer any warmth?

  ‘There were times when I was overcome by a panic, by the thought that here, in this wilderness, I would perish; and my tales would perish with me. I would be buried in an unmarked grave. No one would ever know what I had gone through. Martin, I have not yet begun to tell my story, and the stories of my workmates. Of the Ukrainian who died beside me as the tree fell. He had been sentenced to fifteen years of hard labour because he refused to give up the milk of his last cow to the party. He insisted on keeping it to feed his own family.

  ‘When his wife discovered he had been shifted from the labour camps to a work brigade, she was overjoyed. She saw it as the first sign of his return. She thought that perhaps, soon, after so many years, he would be released, and allowed to journey home. Her letter, full of optimism, arrived the day after her husband was killed.

  ‘We treasured that letter. It became our common property. We did read it, aloud, over and again. We paused at each line, and argued over its meaning. We debated whether she had loved her husband or not. Sometimes we were convinced she had betrayed him. At other times we were certain that hers were a lover's words. We did adopt her as our own. She became our imaginary partner, a reminder of our warped fate.

  ‘Each one of my workmates had a similar tale: the Chechen, the Russian, the Ingush, the Armenian. Each one had been sentenced to years of hard labour for a triviality. And each
one had to learn to accept his cruel lot. Dobynda the Gypsy expressed it best. He would laugh, point to the heavens, and exclaim: “If you believe that you will find a way out of this shit, you may as well go beat your head against the sky!”

  ‘Yet there were other times, as I trudged from one hour to the next, when I believed that one day I would prevail, that one day I would tell my unbelievable tales. I imagined that I would bring back a deeper truth about the taunting beauty of nature. I would bring back my experience of human indifference, and expose the system that produced it. I imagined the astonished faces of the friends and family I had left behind, how they would hang on every detail, on each measured word. I did lie awake at night, beside my snoring workmates, and conjure the picture of my triumphant return. I saw myself walking the final steps to the door. I would tell my story, and my life would not have been wasted.

  ‘Perhaps only a poet can truly describe it. A poet who has been there, and has gone through it himself. A poet can say it all in just a few lines. “On the Tracks of Siberia” is the perfect poem. My poem. Written by a like mind. A parallel mind. By a man who once walked the same roads and forest trails.’

  H. Leivik was the name of the poet, of Laizer's muse. After half a lifetime of suffering, Leivik had finally found his way to the Americas, to a new life; and for a while his verse flowed freely. For a time he sang the song of his former exile and toil. But five years before he died Leivik was felled by a stroke. He could no longer walk, or move his arms. Or even talk, though he longed to impart the remainder of his tale.

  This is how he had ended, spreadeagled upon a bed, with nurses to guide his every move. He lay in a sanatorium ward, just another voiceless patient. How could they know he had once walked the forest tracks of Siberia?

  ‘Survival is, after all, a matter of mazel, of luck,’ Laizer mutters. ‘Of whether you hid under the bush that wasn't bombed, whether you were spared a terminal disease. Or whether you fled north or south, east or west. Leivik understood this all too well.’

  And he recites the poem on this Sunday morning in Scheherazade. In Yiddish. The mother tongue. He recites it amidst the clamour of voices, the clash of cutlery, the rising noise:

  ‘Even now

  on the tracks of Siberia

  you can find

  a button,

  a frayed shoelace of mine,

  a belt,

  a fragment of clay cup,

  a page from a sacred book.

  Even now

  in the streams of Siberia

  you can find

  some trace:

  a sliver of submerged raft;

  in the forests

  a bloodied rag dried stiff;

  on the snow, frozen footprints petering out.’

  On a winter morning in 1944, Laizer awoke in the workers' camp to find his legs swollen from the cold, after days of wading through snow. His legs were bloated boils, oozing pus and blood. He made his way, on skis, thirty kilometres distant, to the nearest village.

  The doctor ignored the boils. He placed a thermometer under Laizer's arm. Because he was not running a temperature the doctor could not provide him with an exemption from work. He had no choice, he insisted. Those were the regulations and, in the Soviet empire, arbitrary regulations counted above all.

  Laizer returned to the camp the following afternoon, and he was charged by Red Army officers with having deserted his battalion. His work companions chided him for not flicking the thermometer with his hands to raise the temperature. He was still an innocent, they told him. They knew they would never see him again. For this is how it always ended.

  Yet there were tears in their eyes as Laizer was escorted from the camp. He had been a loyal companion. They admired him for his youthful energy, his good humour, his hard work. Their tears evoked memories of red embers glowing on white nights, and of star-filled galaxies vaulting over winter fires.

  A horse-drawn sled conveyed Laizer from the Vizir to a military camp where he was sentenced to six months in prison; and it was in prison that the dream took hold, the same dream, night after night.

  It is a Friday night, the Sabbath eve. Laizer is wandering the streets of Vilna. The streets curve in upon each other. He moves over the cobbled lanes of the old quarters. He is lost in a circular maze. He catches glimpses of loved ones. Like mirages, the figures evaporate, until one remains, his father.

  He escorts Laizer to the ground-floor apartment that was the family home. He moves like an automaton. He is beyond intimate reach. He leads his son down a flight of stairs to a large cellar.

  In the cellar stands the table at which they sat together, as a family, for their meals; the table at which they had broken bread and welcomed the Sabbath bride; at which Laizer's mother had lit and blessed the candles and served the Sabbath meal.

  The table is covered in a white cloth. The whiteness is heightened by flickering shadows in the semi-dark. Laizer's father sits with his hands under his chin. He stares at the five candles glued to the white cloth. The wax has dripped into mounds that rise by each candle's side. Only one remains alight.

  ‘Why only one?’ Laizer asks. ‘Where is mother? Where is my brother, Heniek? Where is my sister, Khannah?’

  Laizer's father cannot answer. He has slumped forwards. He no longer moves. His face is gone. Laizer searches for the familiar details. For the look of merriment that once encircled his father's eyes; the knowing smile that had comforted him as a child; but all that remains is the elusive silhouette of an old man, his head resting upon the table, buried in his arms.

  It was only much later, when he returned to the city of rubble that had once been his home, that Laizer came to know: his father and mother, his sister and brother, perished, in a furnace of gas, at about the time when he first dreamed his recurring dream. He remained the one survivor of an entire family.

  V

  Zalman clings to the sea. He walks to his familiar markers. He ascends the shallow peak of Ormond Hill. In the distance, he can just make out the mountains of the Great Divide; it rises above the flat hinterland, an ancient presence, barely visible on this autumn day. It takes his breath away, this expansive view of the bay; and, as always, when he descends he feels weightless.

  Zalman strides against the southerly wind; it is a scorpion wind. It penetrates the marrow and enflames the eyes. He notes the full tide. The waters surge onto the rocks. The spray leaps over the retaining wall. He skirts the yachting marina, veers back towards the lighthouse, and regains the shore. He scans the full sweep of the bay, from the marina to St Kilda pier. Beyond it rises the inner city, a huddle of office towers looming over a basalt plain.

  It is a daily ritual, this walk, a means of regaining the feet, of restoring the present. And there are days of silver and white, of frost and muted light, on which Zalman can sense, acutely, that he lives in a city of the south.

  He sits on the beach with his back to the bluestone retaining wall, and gazes at the waters of the bay. The sky hangs low, lidded with clouds. Occasionally the sun forces its way through the grey, forging a gap of transparent blue. As the sun moves back out of sight, the day is restored to pastel shades. The horizon is a faint grey line. Sky and sea are one continuum of light; and the imagination takes flight.

  On the wings of a seabird Zalman glides towards the south. Over desolate islands he swoops; over rockeries teeming with hooded gannets and Pacific gulls; across stony outcrops littered with penguins and seals; over southern whales heaving their bulk through glacial waves.

  He is moving towards the Antarctic, the great southern bight. He is curving towards the white-domed apex of the globe. He hears the shriek of a tern, and the drone of traffic on The Esplanade. And he is back by the retaining wall, on the city's edge, perched on its southern fringe.

  Zalman savours the moment. He inhales the aroma of sea air, feels the cool texture of damp sand, and allows his back to sink into his rolled-up jacket, his makeshift pillow against the bluestone wall.

  ‘Such
moments are the key,’ he tells me in the cafe. ‘At such times I always marvel that it is possible for me to feel so much at ease. In such moments all journeys come to a blessed end.’

  We meet mid-week, in the afternoons. The quiet hours. When Scheherazade is almost deserted. When old men doze at their newspapers, and waitresses lean on their elbows to stare at passers-by, the Acland Street regulars, the down-at-heel and out-of-work.

  It was Zalman who asked for these mid-week meetings. ‘I can only talk one to one. I need quiet in which to remember, to probe beneath the surface of things. When there are too many people around me, I become an observer. I enjoy the company for company's sake, but I have no interest in joining in. I have never been a good shouter.’

  Zalman speaks softly, weighing each thought, each word. As if no sentence is worth uttering unless it reveals a deeper truth; as if he is in search of lost meanings, a fractured ideal, an elusive thread.

  ‘Martin, we were all trapped,’ he says. ‘What choice did we have? We had to rely on the decisions of others, on those who controlled our lives. Each day the news was more alarming. We sat in Wolfke's and waited, clinging to rumours. We sat in Wolfke's and watched the world spiral towards evil.

  ‘It was a time when those who committed evil flourished and, once set in motion, evil begets evil. Yet amidst this evil there arose a rare saviour, like a flower emerging out of garbage.

  ‘His name was Chiune Sugihara. He was a Japanese consul, based in the city of Kovno, 150 kilometres west of Vilna. He was willing to stamp our visas with permits that would enable us to buy our way out. So it was said. We could not believe that someone would be prepared to do such a thing, especially at that time. It was a complex procedure, full of danger. But it gave us a slim chance, a way out of our netherworld.’

  Zalman pauses. Sips his black coffee. He relishes each drop. ‘In every darkness there is a spark. This is what the sages have always maintained,’ he says. ‘And in the Lithuanian city of Kovno a young yeshiva student called Nathan Gutwirth was driven by desperation to find such a spark.’