Cafe Scheherazade (10 page)

‘Why only one?' Laizer asks. ‘Where is mother? Where is my brother, Heniek? Where is my sister, Khannah?'

Laizer's father cannot answer. He has slumped forwards. He no longer moves. His face is gone. Laizer searches for the familiar details. For the look of merriment that once encircled his father's eyes; the knowing smile that had comforted him as a child; but all that remains is the elusive silhouette of an old man, his head resting upon the table, buried in his arms.

It was only much later, when he returned to the city of rubble that had once been his home, that Laizer came to know: his father and mother, his sister and brother, perished, in a furnace of gas, at about the time when he first dreamed his recurring dream. He remained the one survivor of an entire family.

V

Z
alman clings to the sea. He walks to his familiar markers. He ascends the shallow peak of Ormond Hill. In the distance, he can just make out the mountains of the Great Divide; it rises above the flat hinterland, an ancient presence, barely visible on this autumn day. It takes his breath away, this expansive view of the bay; and, as always, when he descends he feels weightless.

Zalman strides against the southerly wind; it is a scorpion wind. It penetrates the marrow and enflames the eyes. He notes the full tide. The waters surge onto the rocks. The spray leaps over the retaining wall. He skirts the yachting marina, veers back towards the lighthouse, and regains the shore. He scans the full sweep of the bay, from the marina to St Kilda pier. Beyond it rises the inner city, a huddle of office towers looming over a basalt plain.

It is a daily ritual, this walk, a means of regaining the feet, of restoring the present. And there are days of silver and white, of frost and muted light, on which Zalman can sense, acutely, that he lives in a city of the south.

He sits on the beach with his back to the bluestone retaining wall, and gazes at the waters of the bay. The sky hangs low, lidded with clouds. Occasionally the sun forces its way through the grey, forging a gap of transparent blue. As the sun moves back out of sight, the day is restored to pastel shades. The horizon is a faint grey line. Sky and sea are one continuum of light; and the imagination takes flight.

On the wings of a seabird Zalman glides towards the south. Over desolate islands he swoops; over rockeries teeming with hooded gannets and Pacific gulls; across stony outcrops littered with penguins and seals; over southern whales heaving their bulk through glacial waves.

He is moving towards the Antarctic, the great southern bight. He is curving towards the white-domed apex of the globe. He hears the shriek of a tern, and the drone of traffic on The Esplanade. And he is back by the retaining wall, on the city's edge, perched on its southern fringe.

Zalman savours the moment. He inhales the aroma of sea air, feels the cool texture of damp sand, and allows his back to sink into his rolled-up jacket, his makeshift pillow against the bluestone wall.

‘Such moments are the key,' he tells me in the cafe. ‘At such times I always marvel that it is possible for me to feel so much at ease. In such moments all journeys come to a blessed end.'

We meet mid-week, in the afternoons. The quiet hours. When Scheherazade is almost deserted. When old men doze at their newspapers, and waitresses lean on their elbows to stare at passers-by, the Acland Street regulars, the down-at-heel and out-of-work.

It was Zalman who asked for these mid-week meetings. ‘I can only talk one to one. I need quiet in which to remember, to probe beneath the surface of things. When there are too many people around me, I become an observer. I enjoy the company for company's sake, but I have no interest in joining in. I have never been a good shouter.'

Zalman speaks softly, weighing each thought, each word. As if no sentence is worth uttering unless it reveals a deeper truth; as if he is in search of lost meanings, a fractured ideal, an elusive thread.

‘Martin, we were all trapped,' he says. ‘What choice did we have? We had to rely on the decisions of others, on those who controlled our lives. Each day the news was more alarming. We sat in Wolfke's and waited, clinging to rumours. We sat in Wolfke's and watched the world spiral towards evil.

‘It was a time when those who committed evil flourished and, once set in motion, evil begets evil. Yet amidst this evil there arose a rare saviour, like a flower emerging out of garbage.

‘His name was Chiune Sugihara. He was a Japanese consul, based in the city of Kovno, 150 kilometres west of Vilna. He was willing to stamp our visas with permits that would enable us to buy our way out. So it was said. We could not believe that someone would be prepared to do such a thing, especially at that time. It was a complex procedure, full of danger. But it gave us a slim chance, a way out of our netherworld.'

Zalman pauses. Sips his black coffee. He relishes each drop. ‘In every darkness there is a spark. This is what the sages have always maintained,' he says. ‘And in the Lithuanian city of Kovno a young yeshiva student called Nathan Gutwirth was driven by desperation to find such a spark.'

Zalman knows the tale well. He has researched the details in his retirement years. Born in Belgium, raised in Holland, armed with a Dutch passport, Gutwirth had become aware of the extent of Nazi brutality from the final letters of his mother. She had witnessed the German occupation of Holland. ‘Do not return home,' she warned her son. ‘Find a way to escape.'

At the outset of July 1940, Nathan wrote to the nearest Dutch ambassador, who was stationed in Riga. Could he authorise an entry permit for Curaçao, a Dutch colony in the Caribbean Sea? Nathan had heard that a visa was not necessary for Curaçao. In subsequent correspondence, the ambassador agreed to instruct every Dutch consul in Lithuania to stamp the identity papers of any refugee, regardless of nationality.

The honorary Dutch consul in Kovno provided Gutwirth with the desired stamp: ‘No Visa to Curaçao Required', it proclaimed. This was the first step. But how to get out of Vilna? And how to get out of that empire called the Soviet Union?

The least dangerous escape route was via the east. Gutwirth approached Chiune Sugihara. The consul thought it odd that no visa was required for Curaçao, but he stamped the passport, nevertheless, with a visa that allowed Gutwirth a three-week stay in Japan while in transit between any two countries.

This news spread on the refugee grapevine, via the soup kitchens and coffee shops, boarding houses and synagogue courtyards, the crowded apartments and communal halls, the many random spaces into which those who had fled Hitler's armies were crammed.

Zalman Grintraum was among the many hopefuls who travelled from Vilna to Kovno in search of a way out. After they obtained the stamp, ‘No Visa to Curaçao Required', from the Dutch consul, they gathered at the gates of Sugihara's residence. And years later, in a cafe on the opposite side of the globe, Zalman was to tell me that what struck him most about that August morning in 1940 was the silence.

It was a silence that seems to envelop consulates the world over, signifying order, legal procedures, civilised dealings. And for those who stood that morning by the consulate gates, it was also the silence of the desperate, imbued by a longing that was obvious to the Japanese consul as he gazed at the crowd from the window of an upper floor.

Sugihara had sent cables to Tokyo asking permission to issue transit visas for Japan. The replies were ambiguous. He was cautioned, advised to exercise restraint. It is said that he was finally swayed by the words of a Samurai maxim: ‘Even a hunter cannot kill a bird that flies to him for refuge.'

At great personal risk, for he could have faced execution for such an act, Sugihara opened his heart to those who clamoured for assistance. Zalman was one of many who filed from the footpath, through the wrought-iron gates, up the small flight of steps that led to the consulate door. Sugihara did not even look up at him when he finally reached his desk. He was too busy applying the stamps.

Over a period of weeks, until the Kovno consulate was closed at the end of August, Sugihara issued thousands of visas. Two assistants sat in the corridor to help him cope with the demand. Even as he left the consulate for the final time bound for the Kovno railway station, he continued to stamp the visas of frantic refugees.

They pursued him through the streets. They gathered about him at the station. They followed him onto the platform. They clustered at the windows of his carriage. They ran beside it as the train began to move away; and all the while Sugihara stamped their outstretched papers; all the while he responded to their pleas.

He had followed his conscience. He had honoured the ancient maxim. He had done all he could. It would cost him dearly in terms of career, and it would take many years before he would finally receive the honour that was his due, as someone who had dared to shine a light in the falling darkness.

Zalman left Vilna on 8 February 1941. The city was covered in snow. The skies were clear, the sun's rays unimpeded. He left his room at noon, and travelled to the Vilna station by sleigh. The ‘Sugihara Jews' departed at two in the afternoon. They travelled in a carriage reserved especially for them.

As the train moved through the Lithuanian countryside, Zalman recalled the moment, two months earlier, when he had entered the Vilna offices of the NKVD. His fate rested in their hands. He risked being deported to labour camps for daring to ask for an exit permit, but he had little choice. Otherwise Sugihara's stamp would be worthless. He needed to find a way out of Russia to Japan.

Zalman was questioned at length. The room was bare, except for a desk, two chairs, and a photo of Joseph Stalin. Weeks later Zalman joined the anxious crowd at the notice wall outside the Vilna Intourist bureau. When he finally saw his name on the lists of those who had been granted an exit permit, Zalman was elated.

As soon as one battle ended, the next began. The Soviet authorities demanded that the train tickets be purchased in American dollars. Zalman's ticket was finally paid for in currency sent by relief organisations in the USA. There had been many times, in the previous fifteen months, when he felt he was trapped in a rat's maze. Only now that he was moving east did he feel free. At least, for the moment.

The train stopped in Minsk late at night. The carriage was disconnected. Zalman fell asleep, and when he awoke he found he was on the move again. He arrived in Moscow that afternoon and passed the time riding the subway. He marvelled at stations carved in marble, and at underground platforms adorned with chandeliers. He marvelled at the tiled walkways, at the sculptures and mosaic-decorated walls. And at the quietness with which trains glided through a labyrinth of cool tunnels, like phantoms moving in an underworld trance.

The trance continued as he boarded the trans-Siberian, in the pre-dawn hours. The train journeyed over flatlands of snow, and through the Urals, blanketed in snow. The whole of Russia was under snow. Yet for the passengers it did not seem real. They travelled in comfort. The train was heated. Conductors served hot tea. Those with extra money could purchase vodka as they dined.

Zalman was lulled into a reverie, broken occasionally by a glimpse of stations flitting by. He glanced at the sides of railway tracks along which prisoners trudged under armed guard, their heads bent, their shoulders drawn, their eyes fixed in a helpless gaze. It was a fleeting vision of hell; a brief encounter with the other side, followed by darkness, the pulse of the train, the curving of rails in a rhythmic refrain.

The passengers alighted for an hour in Novosibirsk, deep in central Siberia. The platform seemed deserted. Zalman walked towards the waiting rooms. Without warning he was among crowds of people. They milled about like robots. They moved slowly, as if lost.

Whenever they glanced at Zalman, envy flickered in their eyes. He was well dressed, while they were in rags. He walked with a sense of purpose, while they shuffled aside to let him pass. Others remained squatting on the platform, hunched over their luggage, as if guarding their meagre possessions with their lives. In their eyes, Zalman was from another world. He sensed it, and wanted to reach out and touch them. But instead he recoiled in fear and hurried away.

Day became night became day, and on the following night they moved beyond Irkutsk, along the cusp of Lake Baikal. The lake was covered in ice that glowed under a full moon. The ice shone with blue-white light. There was enough light to read by. Zalman would never forget the details of this night, its stillness, its clarity, the full moon rising above an inland sea.

He stood alone. His fellow passengers were asleep. There was a keenness in the air. In that moment he felt a surge of joy, a subdued excitement. He was on the way to the unknown, yet, as the train drifted by Lake Baikal, he did not care. He did not wish to be elsewhere. He wanted this moment never to end, this moment of journeying in solitude, through calmness, past an unknown sea illumined with lunar light.

At the end of the line loomed Vladivostok, a port city squatting on the eastern rim of the empire. The passengers arrived towards evening and were ordered to remain in their seats. They felt uneasy. Troops patrolled the platform. There were rumours that their visas were invalid, talk of last-minute cancellations. ‘We will never leave Russia,' whispered some. ‘We are trapped,' murmured others. ‘How could we have believed we would be able to escape?'

It was still dark when Zalman and his fellow passengers disembarked. They were ferried in buses to the wharves. The city remained a shadowy presence on the periphery of their vision. Here and there they registered the twinkle of lights and street lamps. Before them stretched the black waters of the bay.

The passengers were hurried towards the wharves. They cast their eyes down so as not to meet the customs police's gaze; and they kept quiet. It was the silence of those who have lost the power to determine their fate.

As a grey dawn broke out over the harbour the passengers boarded a Japanese freighter, manned by a Japanese crew. A Russian officer stood by the boarding plank. Zalman presented his documents. The officer tore off the Russian transit visa, and in that instant, Zalman felt it with a startling certainty: this was the moment of no return. He had been severed from the past, from friends, family, and all he had known. He was adrift. He was a refugee. He would always be a refugee.