Cafe Scheherazade Page 5

  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

  The 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:

  ‘Vilna is safe,’ argued one.

  ‘Vilna is too close to the front line,’ asserted another.

  ‘Perhaps it is better to run for the east,’ reckoned a third.

  ‘Better the devil one knows,’ reasoned others.

  ‘Perhaps we should run to the north,’ interjected the realists.

  ‘To the Baltic Sea. Scandinavia. Or perhaps the Atlantic coast.’

  ‘And fall into the Nazi trap?’

  Until Laizer had heard enough. The indecision began to suffocate him. Or perhaps it was simply on impulse that he forsook Vilna and his friends.

  In February 1940, Laizer moved south from Vilna, deeper into Soviet territory, through White Russia and the Ukraine. Despite the fact that he was a refugee, he knew
his Polish passport would be suspect on Soviet soil. So what? These were desperate times, and he prided himself on being a gambler. Soviet-controlled Vilna was too close to Nazi-occupied Poland for comfort. Only a fragile pact between Germany and Russia kept Hitler's armies at bay; and Laizer knew that pacts and alliances between empires could change overnight.

  He was arrested by a patrol of Red Army soldiers, charged with illegal crossing of the border, and entrained, under armed guard, to a Soviet prison in the Ukrainian city of Lvov.

  ‘There were 106 prisoners in one double room,’ Laizer recalls, with precision. ‘We would measure the space we allotted ourselves to sleep in. If you wanted to turn over, you had to ask the people around you to turn with you. It was never dark; all night a single light burned.

  ‘It was a comedy. Our toilet was a drum, standing in the corner of the room. The room did stink of our own waste. We smelt like vagrants, unwashed tramps. We had a daily ration of bread and diluted soup. You could not call it soup. It tasted like swamp water. Every fortnight we received a matchbox full of sugar. This was our first great luxury. There was only one window, high up, and through it, from a certain prized position, you could see a patch of sky, a ray of sun, or dark clouds rushing by. Or, sometimes, even the moon. This was our second and final luxury.

  ‘In return, we could be searched at any time. We were made to undress. They probed every orifice. They looked for weapons, pencils, for surplus rations of bread.

  ‘There was a Polish priest, a fellow prisoner, who did make a chess set out of stale bread. He carved it with his bare hands. Such artistry I never saw in my life. Such elegant knights and pawns. Such fine detail. The chess set was more important to him than food.

  ‘To stay sane, we became inventors and improvisers. When our clothes wore out we carved needles out of fish bones retrieved from our soup. We drew yarn out of our rags, threaded the yarn through the bones, and patched up our clothes.

  ‘And always, they did come to question us late at night. I was led through a long corridor to the interrogation room. The interrogators were well dressed, well fed. I was not beaten. I was not physically tortured. They wanted just one thing, a confession. They claimed they had evidence, but they wanted me to own up to being a foreign spy. It was a kind of game; with always the same questions, always the single globe swinging back and forth, always the dripping of a tap behind me.

  ‘Often my interrogators looked bored. At other times their posture was more threatening, their voices harsh. To this day, when I hear a tap dripping in another room, I have to stop it, immediately. My hearing is so sharp I can pick it up even when the drip, drip, drip, is very light. I am always tightening taps, replacing washers, old pipes. I want to be sure. Prevention is better than cure.

  ‘And I must have soap, on hand, everywhere. For ten months I did not have a shower or a bath; for almost a year I lived with the stench of the unwashed; so today I keep bars of soap on every sink, in the shower recesses, in every cupboard, in every room, and I wash myself many times a day. It is a madness, I know, but I cannot help it. I cannot stand the thought of being unclean. I cannot see continuity in my journey, only broken lines.’

  Towards the end of 1940, Laizer and his fellow inmates were marched from Lvov prison to the central station. They were herded into cattle wagons and conveyed north, through the Ukraine to Byelorussia. They skirted Moscow to the northeast, spent days shunted aside in carriages idling on provincial tracks, jerked forward in stops and starts, and came to a final halt, an eternity later, in Kotlas, a frontier town at the end of a north-western Russian line.

  They journeyed from Kotlas by river barge, hundreds of kilometres north, to Pechora, a town perched on the western flanks of the Urals. They marched on by foot into a world of permafrost and gales. They trudged over frozen streams, across desolate plains of white, broken by an occasional tree, a solitary hut, a stunted bush. They marched as if in a trance, beyond exhaustion. Beyond dates. Beyond all reckoning.

  They moved on even as Laizer fell. The snow was a soft cushion calling for surrender. It seemed to wink at him. He gave in to an imagined warmth. He felt a blessed sense of relief. He closed his eyes, sank towards oblivion, and allowed the life-force to drift away. The world was receding from his grasp.

  He was about to give way when he felt a succession of sharp blows against his body. Laizer was struck in the ribs, his legs, his upper arms, and thighs. He opened his eyes and glimpsed, standing over him, his Polish comrade, a former policeman, the fellow prisoner who had become his marching partner, his closest friend. He observed his friend's fury as he kicked, and he heard his words, as if drifting in another realm: ‘Get up! Get up you fool! Get up you hopeless shit!’

  It took some time for Laizer to awake from his stupor, to feel the pain. As he stirred, he glimpsed the night sky. He heard the voice drifting closer. He felt the marrow seeping back into his bones. His comrade dragged him to his feet, slapped his face, gave him one last kick, and propelled him into the night.

  As he stumbled on, Laizer observed an eerie light cast upon the snow. When he glanced up he saw a full moon so large and so near, it seemed he could reach out and touch it. Or eat it. Or step onto it, to wander its desolate craters and hills. It filled the skies. It filled the heavens. It filled his entire being, and, for a moment, it took him away from the smell of sweat, the life-sapping fatigue, the struggling breath.

  On that night, under an impassive moon, Laizer discovered parallel universes, hovering side by side, one of beauty, one of ugliness, one permeated by darkness, the other suffused with light. On that night Laizer regained his childhood sense of naivety and awe; and he realised that by learning to manoeuvre between these alternate universes he could generate the charge of energy necessary for him to pull through. On that night, Laizer became a survivor.

  Broken lines and maps. I look them up in the library, in the Times Atlas of the World. I search for Vorkuta, the labour camp where Laizer's long march came to an end. I turn to a map of the Arctic, the roof of the world, the point at which the lines of longitude converge to form the North Pole.

  I become giddy, nauseous almost, merely by tracing the lines. From Vorkuta, latitude 68 degrees north, I move anticlockwise, in a circle, following the line of latitude over the polar Urals, the East Siberian and Bering seas, across Alaska, via the Arctic Ocean, to a white expanse known as Greenland, and beyond it to the Barents Sea, full circle back to Vorkuta.

  I have sensed the vastness. I am plotting lines that form ancestral maps, that unify fractured journeys across continents and oceans; lines that convey ancient melodies and longings, and twist and curve and break off into unexpected detours, to converge upon a cafe called Scheherazade.

  I find them there, of course, when next I return. The unlikely trio. Yossel, Zalman and Laizer. Bent over their pastries and coffees. And they know what I am looking for.

  ‘He makes a living from them, that no-good scribbler,’ says Laizer.

  ‘And why not?’ says Zalman.

  ‘Better to sell stories than shmuttes, recycled rags,’ adds Yossel.

  ‘You earn far more selling shmuttes,’ I reply.

  ‘I am not so sure of that,’ says Zalman.

  ‘And what, my philosopher friend, can anyone be sure of?’ asks Laizer.

  ‘Perhaps only stories,’ says Zalman. ‘The rest is speculation.’

  ‘So, my clever little philosopher,’ retorts Laizer. ‘What makes you so sure about the value of stories? Most of us tell them in such a way that we look good, and others look bad. We twist everything to our advantage. We do not tell stories. We create bobbe mayses. Grandmothers' tales!’

  ‘At least they help pass the time,’ says the prosaic Yossel.

  ‘So! I can see it now! I know your little tricks. You are winding up to tell us your bobbe mayses about your wonderful Warsaw and Krochmalna Street. You are preparing to tell us about your no-good friends Mendel Mandelbaum and Stanislaw the pimp. And how you became a hero in underpant
s.’

  ‘Yossel is right,’ Zalman intervenes. ‘We tell stories to kill time. After all, this is how we passed the time in Wolfke's when the world was coming to an end.’

  ‘Such pearls of wisdom, such wonderful turns of phrase, you clever little philosophers!’ says Laizer. ‘It was easy to be clever while you sat in Wolfke’s and let time idle by While you were waiting for the end of days, I was labouring beneath the snows of Vorkuta. And while you were travelling away from Vilna, first-class, I was pushing boulders up ice-clad hills.

  ‘Martin, you cannot imagine it,’ Laizer tells me, as Yossel and Zalman move away. ‘We lived in the Arctic Circle. We lived with lice. We would bet on them for entertainment. How do you say it in English? Odds or evens. We counted them and, when we got sick of the game, we would make a fire in the barracks, take off our shirts, hold them over the flames, and watch the parasites drop off. They fell in the hundreds; and a day later they were back again.

  ‘You cannot imagine it. In winter the earth was a solid mass, rock hard. In summer it softened. The soil was covered in red berries and moss. We were building an airfield. We moved rocks with our raw hands. Two people could barely carry them. We were like Sisyphus, lifting stones, dropping them, and watching them roll backwards. Our food rations depended upon how many rocks we moved, so like Sisyphus we retrieved them and started all over again.

  ‘After a month or so I was sent to work in the coal mines. This was the highlight of my stay. We descended by lift, perhaps two hundred metres under the earth. We worked in complete darkness, waist-deep in ice-cold water. We froze and choked on the dust. And all I could think of was food, my daily ration of bread.