Cafe Scheherazade (7 page)

‘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 underpants.'

‘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.

‘I was obsessed with food. When I fell asleep, I dreamt of my mother's choient and roasts, Wolfke's brisket and schnitzels, Vilna's bakeries and cafes. All the wise sayings of the philosophers were reduced to just one thought: food. We searched every corner, every obscure hole, for just one more crumb.

‘We were entitled to a ration of bread, perhaps six hundred grams, that is, if you fulfilled your work quota for the day. Otherwise an amount was deducted. The bread was lousy and the bread cutters were criminals. Sometimes they would cut off a bit less so they could keep more for themselves.

‘The common criminals were treated better than the political prisoners. In the gulag, political prisoners were on the lowest rung. There was a rigid class system in the classless society! On the top rung were the
nachalniks
, the camp commanders and party bosses. Then came the guards and soldiers who kept their eyes on our every move; and in the stinking barracks the criminals were the true bosses, while we were the slaves.

‘The criminals controlled the kitchens. They were well-fed. They bribed the guards who let them through the barbed-wire fences into the women's camp. They fell upon the women like wild beasts. After all, they were full of energy and zest. But the rest of us had no interest in sex. When you are hungry, food is more erotic than sex. The memory of a Vilna Sabbath stew was far more enticing than the most desirable of women.

‘In our spare time we sat on our bunks and watched the criminals play cards. Mostly they did play for other people's boots or overcoats. The loser would be obliged to attack one of the political prisoners, grab his spoils and give them to the winner. On one occasion they even played for their fingers. The loser stood up, took an axe, and chopped off a finger. I did see it myself.

‘This is what happens to you when you are cut off from the rest of the world. You become deranged. And we were cut off, completely. We were surrounded by barbed wire. Every hundred metres or so there stood a guard tower. If you tried to escape you were shot. And if you got away, where was there to run? The nearest railway line was five hundred kilometres away. The only way out was the way we had come in, by river barge and on foot. Otherwise, the only certain exit was a grave, dug deep in the Arctic earth.

‘We did live in a world of our own. There were Tartars and Uzbeks, Poles and Jews. There were Russians, Mongolians, Chinese and Africans, Gypsies and Armenians. And we got on quite well, mind you. We were in the same black hole together. Within weeks of our arrival, we all looked the same. We were dressed in the same rags. Our shoes were held together with wire. We were covered in sores. Our eyes were red, our faces unshaven. We were a mess of skin and protruding bones. At night many of us did stagger around with ‘chicken blindness', brought on by lack of food. And we smelt the same, of stale sweat and lice-infested rags.

‘We belonged to the same big, hopeless family. We were a brotherhood of no-good bastards, a nation of fools trapped on the roof of the world.'

Some dates remain indelibly carved in the mind. On 13 October 1941, Laizer Bialer and his fellow prisoners, those who had once been Polish citizens, stood in the assembly yard of their labour camp within the Arctic Circle. The brief ‘summer' was long over, the polar cap was girdled in snow, the north winds were about to descend, and the prisoners were told they were about to be freed.