by Arnold Zable
‘All the while, we continued to dream the dream of the displaced. A dream which stole through the narrow alleys of Hongkew in the early hours, when the noise subsided, and a shallow sleep overtook us: a dream of horizons and ports, of ample decks fanned by sea breezes.
‘The dreamers leaned against the rails. In their hands glittered the longed-for treasure, a visa to new worlds. They were sailing towards sanctuaries where the streets flowed with freedom. And they awoke to their dank cubicles, their crowded dormitories, and the rising cacophony of another futureless day.’
The cold rains descended, the north winds took hold and, in the early hours of 8 December 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. In the pre-dawn darkness Japanese troops lined Shanghai's riverside boulevard and launched an assault upon the sole US naval vessel, moored mid-river. They opened fire on the Royal Navy gunboat, the HMS Peterel, anchored further upstream. Outnumbered on all sides, the boat sank in flames. The river glowed in its after-light. Some of the crew were swept downstream as they swam for the shore, where they were captured, and ferried to the infamous Ward Road jail.
At dawn a squadron of planes released leaflets with the news that ‘an unfortunate state of war has come about between Japan and the Allies. Do not panic.’
As the Year of the Serpent drew to an end the refugees of Shanghai were too weary to panic. There was no longer any place upon earth to which they could run. The international concessions had fallen into Japanese hands. The prized city was firmly under their command.
During 1942 the refugees of Shanghai lived in limbo. Their fates were determined according to rapidly shifting definitions of nationality. Those with British, American or French passports were driven out of the city into internment camps. Russian emigres remained in the former concessions, free to work in businesses now transferred into Japanese control. And those who had, at first, escaped definition, those categorised as stateless, awoke on 18 February 1943 to radio bulletins proclaiming the establishment of a ghetto, in a ‘Designated District’ within Hongkew.
Wall posters echoed the news. All Polish, Austrian, Czech and German Jews who had arrived in Shanghai since 1937 had until 18 May to move into a forty-block area. Their movements were now monitored by Japanese troops, Sikh police, and a patrol of sentries drafted from the ghetto inmates.
Zalman spent his nights with Hadassah, Yasha and Chaim. They played chess and draughts, reminisced about Warsaw, shared their meagre rations of food. In the mornings, Zalman would leave his cramped quarters, descend the stairs, and move out into the streets of Hongkew. He returned to his incessant walking; and he knew what he was looking for: those crevices of solitude he had discovered during his walks in Kobe.
In the Shanghai of 1943 such moments were all but impossible to find. Japanese officers strutted about with the arrogant air that characterises occupying forces. The order which had impressed Zalman in Kobe gave way to random checks and indiscriminate beatings. A system of passes restricted movement to and from the ghetto gates. The streets of Hongkew teemed with children fossicking through rubble. Typhus and cholera, beriberi and dysentery claimed many lives. Others died of hunger, heat exhaustion and despair, while those without work sat day after day in ghetto coffee shops and played cards.
And through it all Zalman walked. He walked beside barbed-wire fences and past soldiers clutching bayonets. He walked the lanes of Hongkew, and beyond, into the city at large, whenever he was able to wrangle a pass from the Japanese police. He walked from dawn to dusk, day after week after month, and he returned each night to the windowless room that was his home. This was his one constant, a family, three people to whom he had grown close. But the room was oppressive. Zalman could not wait for the night curfew to end; he would often leave before first light.
It was at dawn that he came upon the image he was looking for. It emerged from a damp fog that lingered over Suzhou Creek. Boats hovered in the mist. A solitary junk moved by, weighed down beneath a mountainous cargo of hay.
On the banks of the creek, Zalman saw a figure trudging over a desolate stretch of earth. In his right hand he carried a birdcage. The old man came to a halt by a tree. He took off his jacket and hung it on the lower branches beside the cage. The trill of a songbird flowed through the bars.
The old man lifted his arms, lowered his upper body and bent his knees. His back remained upright as he glided from form to form, in a slow-motion dance that seemed to defy the routine laws of movement. His legs remained bent at the knee, so that his lower body seemed anchored to the earth, while his upper body floated free, like a bird in flight.
Zalman followed each movement intently. For a moment Shanghai stood still; and Zalman rediscovered his poise. It was a mere fifteen minutes before the Chinaman ceased his movements. Unhurried, he put on his jacket, retrieved the birdcage, and trudged back through the rising mist.
Then he was gone; and although Zalman returned, day after day, at the same time, to the same strip of waterfront beside the creek, he never saw the old man again. He had to content himself with the image. He could conjure it at any time; and with it came the comfort of knowing that such moments could still exist.
In June 1944, the first Allied air raids hit Shanghai. American bombers targeted warehouses, factories and munitions dumps with remarkable precision. By early 1945 the allied armies were well on the advance. Manila fell in February. Iwo Jima in March. By April, Chinese armies were turning their sights back towards Shanghai.
On a searingly hot July day in 1945, pedestrians on the streets of Hongkew would have glimpsed above them shafts of sunlight reflecting silver from the wings of American planes. A diamond formation of bombers broke away and veered towards the shore. Sirens signalled the alert. The planes streaked over Hongkew and tilted towards the intersection of Tongshan and Kung Ping roads.
Below them, Zalman and his adopted family joined a frantic rush of refugees into the corridors of a community centre. They had just finished lunch. They huddled in the corridors. Hadassah stayed behind in the kitchen. She remained wedded to her chores. Perhaps this is what saved her.
Zalman retains a clear picture of what ensued. He recalls conversations, word for word. He hears the muffled explosions. He sees the corridor, in detail, as it is thrust into darkness. He remembers the uneasy calm, riddled with dust. Zalman clutched at the man standing next to him.
‘Let go of me,’ said the man.
‘We are all covered in dust,’ said Zalman. ‘Look. Over there. There's a light.’
‘I am wounded,’ replied the man. And he turned, and ran.
Zalman saw two figures lying nearby. One was Yasha, his surrogate father. He lay motionless. The other, fifteen-year-old Chaim, was covered in blood.
‘I can't feel my leg,’ said Chaim. ‘Go and see how mother is doing,’ he added. ‘Tell her father is dead. Tell her I am wounded. Don't let her see me.’
Zalman rushed to the kitchen. ‘Yasha is dead. Chaim is wounded. I will take care of him. Just stay where you are.’
‘I will do as you say,’ Hadassah replied. Her voice seemed distant. She filled a bucket with water, seized a brush, sank to her knees, and began to scrub the floor. She scrubbed as if possessed. Zalman was struck by her calmness. She continued to work. She was bent over like a rabbi, lost in prayer, but when she briefly lifted her head, he glimpsed the horror in her eyes.
Zalman returned to the corridor. He lifted Chaim onto a door that had been blown off its hinges. A friend helped him carry the boy out to the streets. They barely registered the panic and the noise. They barely noticed the buildings in flames, the casualties laid out on blankets, the bodies scattered over the centre's vegetable garden.
Rickshaw drivers cleared a passage. At the periphery of his vision Zalman saw corpses strewn over the streets. He glimpsed his Chinese neighbours, as if from afar. They were running with sheets and shirts, towels and skirts, which they tore into bandages as they headed for the wounded.
The two men carrying Chaim were direc
ted to a makeshift aid centre, hastily set up in the grounds of the Ward Road jail. Charred bodies lay beside the injured: men, women and children huddled together in the prison yard. Above them loomed watchtowers, barred windows and grey walls. Refugee doctors and nurses tended the victims.
Chaim was lifted off the stretcher. Zalman noted the massive wound in the abdomen. He saw the liver, exposed. A young woman, a doctor, knelt down by Chaim's side.
‘I will live,’ murmured the boy.
‘Leave him with me,’ said the doctor. ‘I will take care of him. And you?’
‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ replied Zalman.
‘You are bleeding all over.’
For the first time Zalman felt the pain, the numbness in his face. For the first time he observed his own wounds, the shrapnel, the patches of blood.
The doctor injected Zalman with anti-tetanus serum. ‘I will operate on the boy. Come back in an hour.’
‘I will live,’ murmured Chaim.
Zalman returned an hour later to learn that Chaim had briefly regained consciousness; he had died just minutes earlier.
A blazing July day in 1945. The war was all but over. Zalman had lost his second family. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to hope for. There was no need to hurry. There was nothing to do but walk.
VI
Scheherazade is a Babel of languages. Each one has its peculiar melody, its distinct tone. Polish and Russian are cool languages. They flow like the Dnieper, the Volga, the Vistula, and the River Bug. German, with its polysyllables, seems to be forever grasping at grandiose abstractions. I hear smatterings of Hungarian and Romanian, and tongues entirely foreign to my ears. And I register countless varieties of English, seasoned by many accents and tongues.
As for Yiddish, it is the main course. A frantic language, propelled by manic winds and enforced flight, a hybrid, concocted on the run. With bits of this, pieces of that: Slavic, a large dose of Germanic, a hint of the Ukraine, and an echo of the Asiatic steppes. With residues of biblical Hebrew, and other ancient tongues. It is a language of wanderers, of Gypsies, tsigeiner.
‘I am a tsigeiner,’ says Yossel Bartnowski.‘I love to be on the move, always in search of greener fields.’
And he sings:
‘Carefree is the tsigeiner's life.
Farria!
We do not have the Kaiser, taxes to pay.
Farria!
Carefree it is in the forests, green
Where tsigeiners will be dancing soon.
Farria. Farria. Farria. Farria.
Far-ri-ya-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.’
Today Yossel is clothed in varying tones of white. He wears a white shirt and cream slacks, an off-white tie and white shoes. He places his white-brimmed hat on the table. His blue eyes are darting about, following the ladies moving past on the street. He glances at the patrons entering the cafe, and surveys the chicken schnitzel that the mini-skirted waitress places by his side. ‘Thank you, my beautiful girl,’ he says, with a wink. ‘Isn't she a krasavetze, a true beauty?’
He unfolds a serviette, and sings:
‘Farria. Farria. Farria. Farria.
Far-ri-ya-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.’
We sit in Scheherazade's alcove, at the window table, mid-afternoon on a hot autumn day. Its light penetrates the back room where Masha and Avram are entertaining friends. It seeps into the kitchen where the yeast hardens in electric ovens and pans sizzle on leaping flames; it creeps into the back lane where last night's leftovers lie fermenting in rubbish bins. It is a naked light, hard and hot. But here, in the alcove, it is airconditioned, cool.
We sit at a round table, a perfect fit, with ample room. We can stretch and yawn and swivel about. It is an ideal viewing place, surrounded by plate-glass frontage and glass doors enclosed in wooden frames. Window reflections obscure us from the view of those who pass by on the pavement outside.
‘Ah, what a wonderful meshugas,’ says Yossel. ‘What a mekhaiye it is to sit and watch. What a pure delight. This is why I have always loved cafes on busy streets.’
A man hurries past, holding his spectacles in one hand, a briefcase in the other, in a permanent state of readiness. A teenage couple, in school uniform, stroll by hand-in-hand. A woman in a black suit, white ribbon in her hair, clatters past on white high heels, with a white poodle in tow. The poodle's head sprouts a black bow.
‘Now that, my dear Martin, is the way to dress,’ says Yossel. He swivels his head from side to side. ‘Ah, what an exquisite girl, the one in the low-cut red blouse. What a krasavetze. Look at the way she glides by. What a mekhaiye. Red is the best colour for such an aristocrat.
‘I do not like being alone,’ he adds a moment later, ‘to sit at home in my apartment. I was born surrounded by people. I have always delighted in crowds. My foolish child, I am a Krochmalna boy. I love life. I want to enjoy myself, to use my allotted time.
‘And I love people. Especially girls. Look at the princess in the leather shorts. Ah, such rounded hips; such sheine fisslakh, such beautiful legs.’
Yossel sinks his teeth into the schnitzel. ‘Scheherazade is a schnitzel gan eiden,’ he says, ‘a schnitzel paradise. It has the best. And every variety. My favourite is the chicken. But, if you wish, you can have veal schnitzel, a Parisian schnitzel, a Wiener schnitzel. Or you can order your own, the way you once had it, over there, homemade, in der alter velt.’
He pauses for another ample bite. ‘And they are honest schnitzels, saturated with oil, swimming in juice, with big portions, and no skimping. Look how it fills the whole plate; it even sticks out over the side. My dear Martin, one thing I know, when there is food, don't be shy. Who knows if you will ever enjoy another meal. Here, have a bite.’
‘I am a vegetarian,’ I say.
‘You are a fool,’ he replies. ‘In nature it is eat or be eaten. This is what I learnt on Krochmalna Street. This is what I discovered, all over again, in Vilna and Vladivostok, in Kobe and Shanghai. This is what I have seen in every city I have passed through in this meshugene velt. So, don't worry. Have a bite. It won't hurt.’
Yossel too made the journey from Vilna to the east as a Sugihara Jew. But he and Zalman travelled separately. Except for their meetings in Wolfke's they lived very different lives. They had not known each other in Warsaw where they grew up in neighbourhoods far apart. Yossel was schooled in the run-down tenements of pre-war Krochmalna Street, where the dividing line between society and underworld was thin. This is where he first learnt to Uve by his wits, to sniff the air and know what was what.
Like so many others, Yossel had fled Warsaw in September 1939. Vilna was a place to draw breath, a footstep beyond the newly drawn borders that divided the Nazi-occupied west from the Soviet east.
‘My foolish child, Vilna was a poor city. There was not enough fuel to make a fire. We would buy a kettle full of hot water and drop in a sweet as sugar. We slept in houses of prayer, in corridors and foyers. We slept in apartments, ten to a room. I lay down wherever I could and, when I woke up, I went out and sniffed the air. I have always relied on my nose. It has never let me down.
‘My nose led me to Wolfke's. Perhaps it was the aroma of food. In Wolfke's you could buy the best choient in Vilna, a delicious stew of onions, potatoes and beans, barley and beef. And their chopped liver was exquisite! With mashed boiled eggs, as smooth as pate. Such a delicacy. A true delight
‘I knew this could not last long. Soon we were living on crusts of bread. But in Wolfke's I made contacts. I began to deal on the black market. I bought and sold currency, tobacco, anything that came my way. One thing led to another and I found myself in a shop selling nuts and bolts, screws and tacks, nails and knick-knacks.
‘I got to know the woman who ran the shop. She was called Dvora, a biblical name. She looked like the women of those times. She was beautiful. I fell in love with her at first sight. I have often fallen in love at first sight. Why waste time? Life is short.
‘Dvora had an agent who supplied her with goods, a
Lithuanian. He sold us diamonds at fifty dollars a carat. I smuggled them from Vilna, to the most elegant hotel in Kovno, where a German buyer paid double the price. Dvora became my sweetheart. We made a lot of money.’
Yossel speaks Yiddish in a Warsaw dialect I strain to understand. The elegance of his clothes belies his Krochmalna Street roots. This was the secret to his success, he tells me—to dress elegantly. Good dress came before food.
‘People liked me,’ he says. ‘This was the great thing, to be well dressed and have charm. This is why people trust you, why people buy from you. First you establish a liking for each other, then you do business.’
Yossel is on the cusp of ninety, yet the charm is still evident. It is not a calculated charm, but rather the boyish charm of a gambler.
‘I have always taken risks. I was willing to step out into the world. Whenever I saw a window I looked through it. If I saw an open door, I was not shy. Whenever I saw a cafe, I stepped in.
‘I wanted to leave Vilna, get out of Europe, sail to the ends of the earth. I could see it was all crumbling. Meanwhile I needed money. With money you can help yourself, and help others. Without money, you are gornisht, nothing. This is what I learnt from the boys of Krochmalna. This is what we schemed about in the basement cafe in the Polonia hotel. Do you think we had a choice?
‘In Vilna I made money. In Vilna I lost money. I was arrested three times. Three times I managed to wriggle free. Our contacts in the diamond business dried up. The Nazis, may they rot in gehennim, were perilously close. I could smell the approaching fear. I sniffed the air and I could sense what was what. It was time to get out.
‘We heard that there was a way via the Baltic. A fisherman would smuggle us over to Sweden. Then we heard that Germans and Lithuanians were intercepting those who were trying to escape, and shooting them on the spot. Wherever we turned there was a trap.
