Cafe Scheherazade (6 page)

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 book,' 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.

Merke alternately sweltered and froze. Through its streets trudged the dispossessed: Poles and Uzbeks, Chechens and Kazakhs, Gypsies and Jews, in search of a home. When at last they secured one, they lived ten or more to a room.

The houses were of mudbrick, the alleys paved with clay. Summer winds whipped the fields into dust. Winter winds capped the nearby mountains with ice. The range stretched towards the Chinese border. Bandits roamed the forbidding terrain. They raided farms and village homes. They battled each other for limited spoils.

Masha acquired another language: Kazakh. She trekked to village markets to sell the shoes her father had stolen from his place of work, and dresses her mother had sewn from recycled bed sheets. The sheets were dyed with the bright colours sought after by Kazakh women. Masha became an adept salesgirl. She learnt to haggle, to extract the highest price. At night she crept out with Lonka, her seasoned partner in crime, to steal beet from the sugar mill.

Masha's mother converted the beet into soup. When the family had eaten their fill, she would carry the soup to the boys of a Vilna yeshiva. An entire school of biblical scholars had fled to Merke. She fed the students and helped sustain them in their stubborn quest for redemption. Surely, the Messiah was finally on the way, argued the scholars. Their people had become wanderers yet again. The yeshiva boys had resurrected their gilded arks and Torah scrolls in the mudbrick shelters of Merke, where they clung to their one constant, their one true home: their trusted scriptures and obstinate love of a tribal God.

On summer nights Masha slept outside, under an arcing dome teeming with stars. On winter evenings she read by candlelight. Her life orbited around the village school, the epicentre of her new life. She fell in love with the Russian classics. She fed her voracious appetite for knowledge. She read so long and so late that in the mornings her father scolded her for wasting precious fuel.

For three full years the Frydmans lived in Merke; until a November night in 1944, when Masha's father failed to return home. He arrived next morning, badly bruised and ashen-faced. ‘Pack immediately,' he ordered. Only when they were well on their way did he dare explain. He had been interrogated and beaten by the secret police. They had demanded he become a spy. They had left him with the devil's choice: either become an informer and pry into the lives of fellow refugees, or be transported back to the labour camps of the north.

A horse-drawn cart conveyed the family out of Merke. They travelled within the shadows of mountains, under cover of night. They journeyed more than one hundred kilometres west, to Dzhambul: a city of mosques and winding streets, of domes and ragged markets, of monotonous days punctuated by the muezzin's sombre call, and nights permeated by uncertainty, the fear of a sudden knocking on the door.

Masha recalls little of her Dzhambul sojourn, except for the Gypsy fortune teller who beckoned to her from a lane. ‘Your hands are so delicate,' she murmured. ‘So white. A girl with such white hands is destined to die young.'

And she recalls a cattle train, standing on the railway tracks. The train was crowded with Chechen refugees. They had been uprooted and deported en masse. The train remained standing on the tracks for days. From its carriages came the sounds of moaning, the cries of old women, and children, begging for water to ease their thirst.

Masha had glimpsed the future. She had glimpsed the fate of millions. The sight of the fear-stricken faces lingered on in her dreams of ghost trains crowded with disembodied white hands, reaching out from behind iron bars; and of a Gypsy fortune teller whispering, ‘You will not live long. A girl with such delicate white hands is destined to die young.'

IV

T
he de facto Jewish parliament is assembling on the pavement outside Scheherazade, as it does every Sunday morning. In pairs, in groups of four or more, they lean on posts, against the parked cars, or prop themselves by the cafe door. While others stand, just so, like birds momentarily arrested mid-flight.

Listen to them argue. Idle by for an hour or two. Observe the hands and the arms. See them make circles and arcs. Theirs is a parliament of self-appointed ministers and speechwriters. There are many problems to be solved. One group analyses the money markets. A second argues over the fluctuating fortunes of rival political parties. A third group tears apart the weekend headlines. They pass judgment on countries near and far. They cast their eyes back to events long past. Their collective gaze extends from the first year of the twentieth century to the last.

Amidst this babble can be heard the voice of Laizer Bialer: ‘So, you think you can save the world, you hero in underpants. So you think you know it all, you no-good bastard, you clever little philosopher, you fool.'

Yet when we sit alone, at a table inside the cafe, on this Sunday morning in late spring, the aggressive banter gives way to a haunting intensity. It can be seen in the eyes. They turn inwards, away from me. Laizer loses all sense of his surroundings; and, without warning, he has glided into another world.

It can come upon him any time, anywhere. He may be walking on the beach, on his daily stroll, aware of the traffic whispering on the foreshore, the waves nibbling at his feet. But Laizer is moving in his parallel universe: standing waist-deep in water beneath the arctic wilderness, or lying on his back, on the boards of a cattle truck, his body registering every bump and jolt.

Or he is being led along a dark passageway, handcuffed, driven by prison guards to a door. The same door night after night. The guards hurl him inside, and he is standing in front of an interrogator whose face is barely visible behind a single globe.

The globe moves back and forth, back and forth. Laizer is mesmerised by the swaying light; his interrogator is demanding: ‘Confess! Admit that you are a foreign imperialist! An enemy alien. A spy!' The lamp is swinging back and forth, and all Laizer can see is the glaring light, and all he can hear is the monotonous drip of a tap, an endless dripping, an endless swinging back and forth.

Again the waves are swirling about his feet; Laizer is back on the cusp of the bay. He makes his way along the well-worn route. Crosses The Esplanade to Shakespeare Grove. Turns right into Acland Street. Rejoins the ‘parliament', the bustling crowds, the arguments which rage on the narrow footpath; and he enters Scheherazade, eager to see a familiar face, to find a table surrounded by friends, even if they are a bunch of no-good bastards!

This morning, however, we are seated alone, as prearranged, so that Laizer can recount his tale. ‘I cannot see any continuity in my journey,' he murmurs. ‘Only broken lines.'

Laizer tells his story in fragments, and in the telling he moves from anxiety to light-heartedness, from obsession to banter, from one city to another. It is left to me to reconstruct the map and the chronology. A scribe, a no-good scribbler, I cannot turn back. What had begun as a simple newspaper story has exploded beyond my grasp. I listen. And I record. Driven by the knowledge that the old men are moving on, nearing the ends of their tumultuous lives; driven by a sense that it would be a tragic betrayal if their stories disappeared without trace.

In the final months of 1939 Laizer decided to forsake Wolfke's, and the interminable discussions of what to do, where to go, where to seek refuge; the debates that raged in the saloon, the restaurant and smoke-filled banquet hall: