by Arnold Zable
‘A thousand and one nights it would take to tell them all,’ adds Avram.
‘I can still listen to them,’ says Masha, ‘and over the years I have noticed changes. He sees things differently with each telling. He is softening. But when I met him he was a man full of mistrust. I could see it in his eyes. If not for the stories I would have run. I was young. I had plans. I was not burdened by so much darkness.’
‘I fell in love with her the moment I saw her; and heard her name. She had a twisted ankle, and walked with a limp. And she was called Masha. I could not believe it. I had known another Masha. We had met in 1938, when I was fourteen years old. Vilna was my whole life, and I was in love with Masha. She was my first love. And she vanished into the same darkness that consumed all my loved ones. Now I was looking at a beautiful woman called Masha. I knew that I could not afford to let her go. I knew instantly that I would pursue her to ends of the earth.’
‘I did not take to him at first,’ says Masha. ‘I was suspicious. I sensed something else; and it frightened me. And, in years to come, what I sensed was to prove true.’
‘Martin, I have never told Masha this. When I fell in love with the first Masha, I would lie in bed on winter nights and write her name on the frosted windowpane. I always coupled her name with two other words, all beginning with M. Masha. Mamme. Makht. Masha. Mother. Strength.’
‘It does not surprise me,’ says Masha. ‘In later years I would have to mother him. I could feel it even then, that he needed a lot of care. But he was very determined. He pursued me. The next time we met, after our first encounter at the Bund camp, was when he stopped over in Katowice. I had not yet moved to Lodz. He was on party business, and he invited me to the hotel. So I went. I was naive. Of course, he wanted to take me, immediately.’
‘I only wanted to give her a kiss,’ says Avram, laughing. ‘Instead, she slapped me. It was a full-blooded patsch, in the face; and it was wonderful to feel it. In the forests I had lost all desire for sex. Like everything else, it seemed brutal. There were partisans who fell upon each other like animals. Sometimes we had to defend our women from partisans who lusted over them. There were some who did pair off, who found comfort in each other's arms. But most of us had lost our desire. There is a Russian saying. It is a curse. Zhit budiesh no yebat nye zekbotches. May you live, but lose the will to screw. And I remained cursed until, with one glance, at the first sight of Masha, in the summer of 1946, my desire returned with full force.’
‘He did not let go. He pursued me. Whenever he saw me with other men, he was jealous; but he did not give up. After I moved to Lodz we would go for long walks to the theatre, the cinema and city parks; and he was always telling me stories. In a way he was cunning. He could see how beguiled I was. And he was a legend, a partisan, a fiery speaker at Bund rallies. A survivor of Vilna, the famous cradle of Yiddish life. Also, I must admit, he was a good-looking boy.’
‘What can I say? When I met Masha, I knew I could not lose her. I had lost too much.’
‘It was not so simple for me. There was a long way to go before I fell in love with him. Even when we did finally become lovers, I still saw the signs, the moments of rage. Martin, it is a long story. Do you have time for all this?’
‘I met Masha. She listened. She took me back to my first love. Perhaps, after all, it was beshert.’
Besbert. It is a word impossible to translate. An Hebraic word, with many layers of meaning. A word which invokes treks across biblical landscapes. An expression which contains the traces of chance encounters that change lives, and epic voyages towards the light. A word which hints at miracles. Or, perhaps, just mere coincidences. A term which twists its way back to Masha and Avram, to the first intimations of love.
VIII
In Acland Street, St Kilda, there stands a cafe called Scheherazade. Yes, dear reader, the question still remains: why did Avram and Masha choose that name? We have sat through long evenings, and greeted many dawns. We have met so many times, on Sunday mornings and week-day afternoons. We have seen the turning of the seasons, the passage of three full years. Nu?
‘It is simple,’ says Avram.
‘Not so simple,’ claims Masha. ‘First we should tell Martin how we left Poland. Actually, I did not want to leave Poland. I was happy in Lodz. I was studying to be a doctor. Instead I became a refugee all over again. A nobody’
‘For a time I felt the same,’ says Avram. ‘I thought we could rebuild our lives in Poland. But after the Kielce pogrom I was not so sure. I was sent there, in July 1946, as a member of a Bund delegation, to investigate. Out of a pre-war population of forty-five thousand, two hundred Jews had returned to Kielce after the war, from the Soviet Union, from the camps and places of hiding.
‘The police confiscated the pistols of the returnees the day before the pogrom. They had no means to defend themselves. Forty-two Jews were murdered in the assault. Our delegation was denied entry to the city, but I saw some of the injured when we returned to Lodz.
‘Their wounds were terrible. Some even had stiletto marks imprinted on their faces. They were attacked by a mob, by men clutching knives, and women who used their pointed heels as weapons. They battered their victims in a frenzy. When I looked at the wounded my old suspicions returned; and my bitterness, my rage.
‘Yet even then I wanted to stay. Not all Poles were anti-Semites. There were Poles who had saved Jewish lives. There were Poles who had been our comrades in the forest, or worked with us in the partisan underground. If I have learnt nothing else, it is this. No one has a monopoly over hatred. No one has a monopoly over suffering.
‘The final blow came in 1948 when the Communist Party absorbed the Polish socialists. We understood what this meant. Once the Bolsheviks came to power there would be no compromise. The Bund would become a prime target. We had no alternative but to escape.’
‘I was anxious to finish my studies,’ says Masha. ‘I had reached the fourth year. But I also had no choice. As a Bund leader in Katowice my father was in danger of being arrested. He told me if I did not join him in leaving Poland, the whole family would have to stay. I would have their lives on my conscience.’
‘We were under surveillance,’ says Avram. ‘For months we had been smuggling out our comrades and friends. Some stole out via the port of Danzig, over the Baltic Sea to Sweden; others fled via the Tatra mountains to Czechoslovakia. We had contacts in the Polish border police, a network of smugglers and supplies.’
‘I remember the day of our decision well: 25 May 1948, Avram's birthday. We were with a group of Bund comrades in an apartment in Lodz. They were all planning their escape.’
‘You see, Martin, there were two ways to leave Poland,’ says Avram. ‘Those of us who had been very active in the Bund decided to steal across the borders. But Masha's father tried the legal option. He wanted his family to remain intact. He had applied for, and received, official exit visas, a year earlier. He decided to leave openly.’
‘On that day, Avram's birthday, when he told me he was going to escape, we agreed to meet in Paris,’ says Masha, pursuing another tack. ‘It was then that there came to us the idea that we would celebrate our reunion in Scheherazade, as did the lovers in Remarque's novel. We would go to the nightclub and drink Calvados, the apple brandy that the lovers drank. It pleased us to think we were involved in a romance. It pleased us to think we were like characters in a novel. It lightened our burden. Besides, it was not certain that we would ever see each other again.’
Their hopes turned towards Paris. They fantasised a way out beyond their landlocked lives. At the centre of their imaginary map stood a beacon called the Arc de Triomphe. Radiating from the arch, like tracks of tinsel, sprawled the boulevards of a new dream. In their mind's eye they beheld dimly lit bridges rising from the River Seine. They saw themselves strolling over cobbled streets lit by lamps glowing like replica moons, or gliding in a carriage through the Bois de Bologne, the melodious clip-clop of hooves marking time within the shadows. They pictured the elegant dec
ay of the Hotel International, its foyers reeking with stale carpets, its rooms layered with dust; and if its rooms proved to be too stifling, they could make their way to Scheherazade, a lover's retreat.
After all, despite all they had endured, Masha was twenty-one and Avram twenty-four, when they decided to leave Poland.
Avram left in mid-September 1948, when the first cold winds began to blow. The countryside lay resplendent under a veil of golds. Mid-morning frost rose from the earth. The land was spent, the harvest all but over; ochre haystacks and cow dung lay scattered over fallow fields.
There were six in the group: four men and two women. Comrades, toughened through years of struggle, buoyed by each other's company, and young enough to feel the thrill of intrigue. They were veterans, masters of stealth in times of danger. Each one had seen death many times over, felt its presence, inhaled its stench.
They journeyed by train south, from Lodz to Katowice. They squeezed into a taxi and drove deep into the Tatra mountains. They got out several kilometres from the Czech border, and moved on by foot, guided by a professional smuggler. They descended through a forest to a frontier stream, hid until evening, and waded across the border at night.
Many years later, what they would recall about this moment was not the fear, but their amused irritation as Avram chewed a bar of chocolate. The crackle of silver foil grated on their ears. It took a supreme effort to restrain themselves from breaking out into fits of laughter.
They crept over a strip of no man's land, and continued on, by foot, through the night, towards the Czech city of Bratislava. They approached its outskirts at dawn, joined Czechoslovaks on the way to work, and merged with the moving crowds. They made their way to the central station, and boarded a train to Prague.
They allowed themselves time to visit Prague's renowned synagogue, and the ancient cemetery that had miraculously survived the war intact, but moved on before the day was over. Now that they had set their sights on the west, they did not want to look back.
They entrained for Germany. They crossed over the Czech–German border with ease. For the first time they were not questioned. Their safe passage had been prearranged. They stepped off the train in Munich. Avram could not abide the thought of remaining there for even a day. Munich was the heartland of the former Reich. Dachau concentration camp was nearby; and just 160 kilometres to the north, stood the bombed city of Nuremberg.
A mere decade earlier the Nazi Party had marched over its cobbled streets. They held aloft banners of the eagle as predator. They had gathered, in their tens of thousands, on the outskirts, in the assembly grounds, on fields and runways where the Nuremberg rallies took place.
Whenever Avram saw men in uniform, whether railway bureaucrats or security guards, the passion for revenge shook his whole being. The final glimpse of his mother returned to goad him on. ‘Take care of yourself in the forest,’ she told him. And then she disappeared, amidst the barking of dogs, the screams of the wounded, arm-in-arm with her daughter, Basia, clinging to baby Nehamiah, clasping the hand of little Shmulek.
Avram moved on in haste. Now that the decision had been made, he did not want to endure a moment's delay. And there was something else: his longing for Masha, a girl with blue-green eyes. Only now that they were separated did he realise how intense this longing was.
He left the group and travelled on alone, west from Munich to Stuttgart, where he met up with a former comrade. Together they journeyed to the French border, guided by a smuggler. They hid in a cemetery until nightfall. The smuggler directed them to a church that stood against the border. They scaled a brick wall and Germany was behind them.
They made their way to the nearest station, boarded the final night train, avoided the gaze of conductors, and remained curled up on their seats, their faces concealed by the dark. Their imagined freedom was within their grasp. Yet the hours dragged by. They finally drifted into an uneasy sleep. They journeyed through one last night; and awoke to a sprawl of Parisian suburbs, radiant in the morning light. It was 23 September 1948: Avram would always remember the exact date.
The Frydmans left Poland in the first week of October, almost a month after Avram. They left together: Masha, her father Joseph, her mother Yohevet, her sister Sala, the entire family, except for her younger brother, Lonka, who had preceded them to Paris. They left with official exit visas, and four hundred books packed tightly in wooden crates.
At the Polish–German border, officers entered their carriage. They examined their passports, stared at their photos. Masha recalls her fear, her heart pounding, her helplessness before these uniformed men. As the Polish border police searched their bags, the Frydmans adopted the pose they knew so well; they shrank back in their seats, as if trying to become invisible. One suspicious glance, one word out of place, would have betrayed their cause.
Nevertheless, Joseph was arrested, and led away. No explanations were given. The three women were left stranded. They returned to Katowice.
For three weeks they made inquiries, knocked on doors, prowled the corridors, waited for hours in police stations and government offices, until they finally traced their father to the city jail. And their fear returned; an ancient fear, compounded by so many false exits. Years later, in Melbourne, this fear would surge up whenever Masha saw policemen in uniform. She would cross the street to avoid their gaze, and she would hurry away, as if to suppress the memory of the moment when, yet again, her dash for freedom was derailed.
In Paris, Avram counted the days. He felt Masha's absence as a burning ache. As the time for her scheduled arrival drew closer, his anxiety increased. He made his way to the Gare de Lyon with a fearful heart. As the train he believed she would be on drew into the station, he scanned each carriage, each exit in vain. All that arrived were the four hundred books.
When Avram learnt what had happened to the Frydmans, he decided to return to Poland. It was simple: he could not live without Masha. But it was a dangerous mission. He needed a false passport and disguise. He waited nervously for the passport to arrive. He wandered the streets of Paris driven by a feeling of dread. The city had lost its imagined appeal. The Arc de Triomphe appeared cold, a hollow colossus, sagging with defeat. The Eiffel Tower was a weight of naked girders streaking into leaden skies. The City of Lights was an inaccessible vision. Its cafes mocked him with their promise of companionship. Sounds of laughter grated upon his ears.
Avram became acutely aware of the other city, within the shadows. He observed the weary-eyed revellers, searching like robots for half-remembered thrills. He saw those who wandered alone, kindred spirits in search of lost love. His gaze was drawn to the flights of steps, which descended to the lower embankments and netherworlds.
He could imagine them all too well, the sewers that threaded beneath the city's elegant streets. After all, they threaded through his dreams; a recurring nightmare of a man forever crawling through shit, through the incessant dripping of urine and sweat, a man tunnelling through the city's intestines for a way out. The tunnels spiralled into dead ends. He did not know where they led. Or under which city he was burrowing. Was it Vilna or Paris? Or was it a nameless city where informers begged for mercy with the terror of death in their eyes, a city where those who made love at dawn were hanged before the day was out?
Yet even these nightmares were preferable to the dreams of loved ones he had lost. They appeared before him in a revolving procession. Basia. Yankel. Shmulek. Nehamiah. And Etta, with a scarf held tight in her hands. ‘Take care of yourself in the forest,’ she whispered. And in her place, like an apparition, appeared the face of a girl with blue-green eyes; her name was etched in the frost; and Avram was back in a room in Vilna.
He could hear the sounds of the mahogany piano drifting in from an adjoining room. A woman was playing; the keys flashed black and white like rotting teeth. Again he was disoriented. Was it his sister Basia playing the piano, or the girl with the blue-green eyes?
More faces appeared, at once distinct and vague; th
ey vanished into the darkness from which they had emerged and in their place he observed faces of cruelty and stone, hovering over makeshift tables, barking orders, laughing.
Avram would will himself to awake; and he awoke alone, in the hotel room where he had imagined spending his first nights of consummated love. He glanced out of the window at a skyline of gables, spires and domes; a familiar skyline, his childhood Vilna writ large. He heard the hissing of the heating pipes, a cough in an adjoining room. He listened to the snarling of cats at war in a back lane.
Avram left his room and prowled corridors that smelt of stale cabbage and dust. Through a door, left momentarily ajar, he glimpsed a Russian emigre seated in front of an icon of his patron saint. The icon stood on an improvised altar, behind a solitary candle in which there flickered an ancient dream of return.
In a nearby room sat a circle of exiles, in flight from Franco's Spain. They were scanning newspapers from which they raised their heads to argue with each other. Or was it merely a futile attempt to pass time?
In the room opposite sat a grey-bearded Algerian, on the edge of his bed, his gaze fixed upon the wall. Who was he waiting for? How long had he been adrift? How long had he been spitting blood with each uncontrollable cough? Most likely he had made his way from the outposts of a dying empire to the City of Lights, only to find the doors locked; only to discover he was, after all, an outsider, an interloper from foreign shores.
In every room suitcases lay in corners, under beds, against walls. Some rooms had collapsible spirit-cookers, and a few odd utensils, a frying pan, a knife, a fork, or perhaps an all-purpose spoon.
The hotel was a universe of fading wallpaper and rickety chairs; of sagging mattresses in bare-boned rooms lit by a single bulb. There were times when every inmate, from the night porter to the last guest, seemed to be aflame with that exhausted longing so characteristic of the displaced.
