Zalman 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.
His only security was his fellow passengers, the three hundred or so he had travelled with from Vilna. They were the last constant. They were exhausted and disoriented. They hovered on the brink of the unknown. But they were together, a herd of kinsfolk, assembled by chance. And in this they found comfort.
Zalman seems like a man permanently perplexed. He sits in Scheherazade on a week-day afternoon. Again he sips his coffee slowly, savouring the taste, savouring his thoughts, devouring the sun that pours through the window. In the years of his retirement, this is what he loves most: to savour, to take his time.
‘Our centre of gravity had shifted,’ he tells me. ‘This is what I sensed as I stood aboard the boat on the day of our departure. The sailors loaded it with freight. Their cargo included a herd of horses. They were led aboard just as we had been, hours earlier. You could see their confusion and fear. We were no different. We were merely animals being shunted about. And our centre of gravity had shifted: away from Poland, Russia, Europe, away from our childhood homes.
‘To this day, I no longer have a centre of gravity. I feel rootless. I will always feel rootless. I had been stripped of everything. Of the scent of my youth, my known way of life. And there is a certain advantage in this, a certain freedom. Even today, though I have lived in Melbourne for over fifty years, I have no sense of belonging. I am acutely aware that everything is temporary in life, a mere bridge. One does not build a house on a bridge. Instead I find my true home inside. I escape inside and I can go wherever my fancy takes me.
‘You have a taste for champagne, but a pocket only for beer. So the saying goes. But I have enough imagination to make beer taste like champagne. This is the great gift I received. Through losing everything, I became free.
‘I no longer care for anthems, and I no longer care even for nations. They too are transient. The truth of who we are lies elsewhere, in the way we order our inner lives as we drift over unknown seas.
‘In losing everything, I have come to value everything: to savour this cup of coffee, its warmth, its aroma, to savour my walks by the sea, and this moment with a friend, at a table in Scheherazade. What more is there? Can you tell me?’
The Japanese freighter weighed anchor towards evening. Fragments of debris floated by. Ice breakers swept the bay. The lights of Vladivostok blinked as the vessel moved away. Zalman was afraid he would be sick. But the sea was smooth. The gentle rocking of the boat soothed him.
As they headed out into the darkness Zalman descended into the hold. It was divided by aisles that threaded between rows of straw mats. Passengers lay on the mats. Some were lost in sleep. Others stared at the ceiling. In a dark corner a bearded man, in a black caftan, rocked back and forth in prayer.
Zalman lay down on a mat and fell asleep. He slept deeply. He awoke feeling sick. It was still night. His head ached. His whole body ached. He staggered out onto the deck and vomited. He crawled back onto the straw mat, fell asleep and awoke again, hours later, to a cool sensation on his lips. A fellow passenger was feeding him a slice of apple. He smiled. Zalman has never forgotten that smile or that act of kindness from an older man. A wiser man. Zalman ate the apple and fell back into the darkness.
He awoke again at dawn, and climbed the stairs to the deck. The sea was as smooth as a table. On the horizon he could make out the coastline of Japan. Pine trees rose above distant dunes. The boat floated on a sedate sea. He stood there for hours; he did not know for how long. He had to tear himself away to descend for breakfast.
Zalman returned to the front deck in the late morning. The sun was high. The coast was approaching. He could see forests, fields, wooded hills, a port, and the entrance to a bay. And he thought, ‘I am entering the land of Madame Butterfly.’
The Tsuruga wharf drifted towards him in a tranquil dream. Zalman saw the town, its streets lined with wooden houses the colour of teak. He focused on one house. He saw a door. It slid open and he saw a woman in a kimono. She flitted by on wooden clogs. Then she was gone. But in his imagination she remained a luminous presence, a glimpse of the unknown, a Madame Butterfly.
Zalman yearns for peace of mind, but unresolved questions remain, the feeling that he is still on a journey over which he has long lost control. He returns again and again to the moment when he farewelled his loved ones in Warsaw and fled towards the east.
Somehow it was too hasty. There was not time to stop, to register the last image of his mother, the last words of his father, the final sight of familiar streets. How was he to know that it would be forever? This is what has nagged at him for over fifty years. His life has been one long journey away from certainty.
And there is something else. Call it a sense of guilt, perhaps. Call it paradox, an uneasy admission; but there were moments of unexpected elation as he journeyed away from Vilna, moments when he felt an intoxicating surge of freedom. Never was this feeling stronger than on the day he first glimpsed the land of Madame Butterfly.
On the following morning, at dawn, he was escorted from the freighter onto the wharf and through the deserted streets of Tsuruga. They walked, a party of three hundred or more, through the sleeping town. They walked along narrow streets lined with rows of wooden houses. Miniature bridges looped over cement ditches to the entrance of each dwelling. A lone woman swept the street in front of a store. Two fishermen trudged to the beach front, their nets draped over their backs. Behind the town loomed hills over which the sun had yet to rise.
Their lives were in the hands of customs officers and railwaymen, of Japanese authorities and Jewish relief workers who directed them through the gates of the station. They marched to the end of a platform and, exactly on time, to the very minute, the train arrived.
The doors opened. The refugees filed in and sat down, each one on a seat of their own. This is what struck Zalman, the efficiency, the precision, the politeness; and cleanliness. More than ever he felt as though he was moving in a dream.
The train crawled over mountain passes. Zalman caught glimpses of cascading waterfalls and gorges. He saw pines bent back by centuries of wind. He saw fields criss-crossed with flooded paddies. Peasants stood in the fields, dressed in high boots, colourful blouses and pyjama-style pants. He saw women with white headscarves and sashes tied around their waists. He glimpsed clusters of cottages, their tiled roofs cast in mauve and turquoise tints. He saw the ruins of a castle, the lush gardens of a villa. He caught sight of wooden temples, and pilgrims gathered about a shrine.
The train approached industrial complexes smudged with smoke. Open fields gave way to city thoroughfares and milling crowds. The train slowed to a halt, the doors parted. The refugees filed out. They were met on the platform by relief workers who escorted them out of the station and through the streets of Kobe.
They walked under a winter sun, stateless men and women in transit. They walked exposed to its glare, unaccustomed to the light, their eyes blinking. They walked in their crumpled clothes, the shabby suits they had worn since they left Vilna.
Among them walked yeshiva boys in black pants, white shirts and narrow-brimmed hats, clutching prayer books wrapped in embroidered bags. Beside them walked rabbis clad in black satin coats, and a scattering of children, the girls in head kerchiefs and frayed dresses, the boys in knickerbockers and worn jackets. The children moved hand-in-hand with selfappointed guardians, or with their mothers and fathers, those numbered few with families intact.
Mostly they were single men who, like Zalman, could not erase the faces of dear ones. These were the images that plagued their minds as they ascended a steep incline. Below them, coming into view, was yet another harbour. The vista expanded as they climbed. The harbour was crowded with gunboats and freighters.
The bay glowed under a sheen of silver. The strip of foreshore extended inland, several hundred metres flat, before ascending into the hills up which they trudged. They moved past houses flying the flags of France and Britain, of Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. They were in the international quarters, among the homes of merchants and diplomats, wealthy traders and shipping agents.
As they climbed, Zalman was overwhelmed by a sense of wonder. The entire day had been a reverie. He had been entranced by the beauty about him, the symmetry. He had been seduced into a sense of security, of being in capable hands. He had journeyed through a land of strange gods and fast-flowing streams. Yet, like so many of the men about him, he could not forsake the thought of those they had left behind with the promise of better days.
They still clung to that hope. They talked politics incessantly. They clutched at every possibility. They fantasised about moving to America, Australia, Canada or Palestine. At night they lay on tatami mats and conjured impossible futures; and they arose each morning from the homes the Jews of Kobe had rented for them, within the European settlement, and descended to the community centre.
It stood at the foot of the hills, a cluster of rooms in a narrow lane. They would come to know it well, the several thousand refugees who were to pass through Kobe in the spring and summer of 1941. They spent many hours in these rooms where they filled in forms, read papers and listened intently to communal radios, to each shred of news.
Zalman can still see the cramped offices, the metal filing cabinets, the battered wooden desks. He can smell the kerosene heaters and feel the morning sun through the windows, relieving the gloom. And to this day he can recall the pounding of his heart, as he stood, each morning afresh, at the communal bulletin board, in the hope of a message from ‘home’, thousands of kilometres to the west.
Zalman would scan the board, shrug his shoulders, and move out into the streets. The news was rarely good. The armies of the Third Reich continued their murderous drive. Visa applications were being rejected, doors were being sealed. What else was there to do but walk?
He walked past stalls laden with bananas and tangerines. He stopped at shops selling herbs and spices he had never smelt before. He inhaled the aroma of fried foods sold by market vendors who lined the way. He wandered lanes teeming with women in grey kimonos, ferrying babies upon their backs. He saw passers-by dressed in army jackets and khaki pants. Radios blared martial music. Makeshift cooking stoves lined the sidewalks. The scent of frying fish curdled the air. Bicycles and rickshaws thronged the streets. A military motorcade glided by.
He descended to the flatlands and walked towards docks lined with military hardware. Tanks and artillery sweated under tarpaulins. Warehouses sprawled beside the wharves. Officers strutted the foreshore.
Zalman returned to the heights. He traced a well-worn path to a neighbourhood park. He sat on a bench overlooking the harbour. He gazed at hillside cottages tiled in crimson and blue. He noted the strands of bamboo, the beds of camellias in full bloom. He observed the first buds of plum blossoms. His treks would always end here, by the park bench, overlooking the city.
At nightfall Zalman would return to the two-storey brick house he shared with a group of single men and two families. Directly opposite stood a house occupied by Germans. On a white pole, above the roof, fluttered the Nazi flag. They would pass each other occasionally, German merchants and stateless Jews, without uttering a word; and more than ever, Zalman felt that he was living in an illusion, within a remote kingdom into which he had blundered by pure chance. There was nothing he could do but bide his time. Walk. Embark on excursions to the hinterland.
He joined a group of friends on an outing to the resort town of Takarasuka, renowned for its women's theatre. The town was ablaze with spring blossoms. Zalman sat with his group of companions in the Takarasuka Grand Theatre and gazed at a revolving stage on which they saw epic battles between Samurai warriors, Moulin Rouge-style can-can chorus lines, gladiatorial contests set in ancient Rome, and Broadway-inspired song-and-dance routines, performed in an eccentric theatrical amalgam of west and east. The boundaries of the world seemed to be dissolving. The foundations were melting beneath his feet.
On one of his walks Zalman came across a small cafe, a cluster of seats in a dimly lit room. He was drawn inside by the sounds of a Schubert sonata. A Japanese woman dressed in a kimono served ice-cream sodas and ersatz coffee. When the music ceased she returned to the record player and replaced the sonata with a Chopin polonaise.
There were six clients before him, awaiting their turn. When their request had been played, they moved on to make way for new customers. The waitress approached Zalman and handed him a booklet filled with a list of titles. He chose the final movement of a Tchaikovsky concerto.
The cafe was the brainchild of a Japanese with a passion for classical music. Signs on the wall indicated it was forbidden to talk. If a customer disobeyed, the owner would stop the music and frown. The cafe was for music lovers only.
Zalman became more attuned to the nuances of the senses. He began to discover, on his daily walks, crevices of peace: the tinkling of a wind chime, the sight of Shinto priests hurrying by, otherworldly in their white gowns and black hats; a glimpse of an old man in a secluded garden; the chant of a Buddhist monk echoing from a neighbourhood temple; the sing-song prayers of rabbinical scholars from Poland, flowing from their temporary house of worship.
Zalman had been raised in a family of free thinkers, of socialists and secular Jews. Yet he could recognise in both the Buddhist chants and the Hebrew prayers the same yearning for harmony in a world gone mad. He heard it also in the music cafe, during his frequent visits: that particular moment within the trembling echo of a single note; a moment of sudden clarity and pure tone.
It was in the cafe, between recordings, that he was told by a fellow patron that a Japanese opera company in Osaka, a city thirty kilometres from Kobe, was to perform Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata. Zalman would never forget the details of the following day. In the morning he collected money from fellow opera lovers among the refugees and travelled to Osaka to purchase the tickets.
When he arrived at the Osaka station, Zalman approached a policeman directing traffic in the middle of a busy intersection, and asked him the way to the Kabuki-za theatre. The policeman halted the traffic and guided him to a tram stop. He remained with Zalman until he found someone who could direct him further.
A bystander escorted him onto a tram. Fifteen minutes later they arrived at the theatre. Zalman purchased the tickets and that evening he returned from Kobe, with his party of friends, to attend the opera.
The Japanese performers looked somewhat stiff and uncomfortable in their rendition of Italian arias. Yet there was an addictive charm about their attempts to emulate a culture far removed from their own. The performance worked its own magic. Arias came to resemble hypnotic chants. The fluid movements of the west slid into the stylised stage movements of the east. The conventions of European opera merged with the rituals of a Kabuki play. Zalman was entranced.
After the performance he wandered the streets of Osaka with his companions. They savoured the summer air. ‘A year ago who would have thought it possible,’ they mused, ‘that we would be watching La Traviata in Japan?’ They returned to Kobe in high spirits, and the following evening they learnt that the armies of the Third Reich had invaded Russia.
As they began to absorb the news on that June night, in the Japanese summer of 1941, they knew their world could no longer be the same. Within days they heard that sections of Vilna were in flames. More than ever they were isolated from the loved ones they had left behind. More than ever they were plagued by a sense of guilt and unbearable longing.
The route back to the old world was cut off. Ships could no longer make the journey from Vladivostok to Tsuruga. The American option had dried up as relations with Japan soured. Curaçao was beyond reach. The Japanese were being pressured by their German allies to deal more harshly with refugees. In frantic negotiations behind the scenes, between Jewish community leaders and Japanese authorities, one last option was agreed upon.
On 17 September 1941, after an interlude of seven months, Zalman and his companions descended from their hillside homes to the harbour, suitcases clutched in their hands. It was an autumn day. Kobe glistened in auburns and golds. The city seemed distant and calm. Again they were strangers, detached from the mainstream, captive to a journey beyond their control.
The refugees boarded the passenger ship, the Taiyo Maru. Towards evening they stood on the decks gazing at their former haven on the heights. They watched until the widening gap extinguished the last receding lights; and as he recalls that moment, Zalman pauses, and lapses into stillness, as if reliving his sense of resignation, and the helplessness he had felt as the Taiyo Maru made its way into the darkness towards the South China Sea.
Even as we sit and drink and argue and talk at the tables of Scheherazade, even as I continue to listen to their tales, they are moving on, the old men. One by one they are going. Every few weeks I hear of another death. I have been drawn into their collective fate. I follow them to the cemetery that sprawls at the southern fringe of the city, an hour's drive from the cafe.
I have farewelled them in all seasons now: on spring days, following the funeral bier along paths sprouting weeds and errant flowers. On days of summer heat, over paths hardened and parched. On winter mornings under skies sagging with clouds, the mud sucking at the shoes, the gravesides sodden with clay. And on autumn afternoons, the sun low on the northern horizon, the paths gilded with plant decay.
The cemetery stands on a flat plain. To the north rise the hills of the Dandenong Ranges. On clear days they appear like cardboard cut-outs, lit up in startling focus against expansive skies. On such days I glimpse the final irony in the old men's journeys, the final twist in the tale.
They had come from the old world to the new to remake their shattered lives. Yet it can be sensed, by their gravesides, that this too is an ageing land; worn low by geological time into wooded hills and basalt plains, its features suffused with its own peculiar light which illumines the rabbi intoning the funeral rites.
His voice dissipates in the wind. Eulogies evaporate mid-air. One by one old friends step up to shovel the freshly dug earth over the pine casket. Those that step back converse quietly in this moment of suspended time.
As the mourners depart, two attendants complete the task of covering the grave. Within minutes all that remains is a mound of earth topped by a wooden stave. The crowd has dispersed. A generation is moving on. And with each passing life I feel it more keenly: there are tales aching to be told, craving to be heard, before they too disappear into the grave.
So I return to the cafe, to the remaining storytellers, to listen and record. To inscribe and pass on. And, in so doing, to add to the mythology of an ancient land.
When I ask him to recall the years he spent in Shanghai, Zalman is somewhat vague. ‘Shanghai? What stands out? What impressions come to mind? The confusion. Where Kobe was symmetry, Shanghai was chaos. Where Kobe was an idyllic interlude, Shanghai was a rat's maze, a dead-end.
‘Martin, if I were a painter trying to depict Shanghai in the war years, I would plunge my brush into all the colours of the palette and splash them on thick, at random. Or if I were a musician I would take all the instruments from all over the world, put them together, and say, “Hey! Blow! Scream! Bang! Play as loud as you can! All of you!”
‘What more can I say? In Shanghai I had a persistent feeling of wanting to run away. I felt as if I was stuck in a swamp. Shanghai was the lowest ebb, and within its chaos I had to surrender, to let go of all hope. Yet, in Shanghai, strangely enough, I rediscovered the moments of solitude I had learnt to recognise on my daily walks through the streets of Kobe.’
Again the wrinkling brow as Zalman speaks; again that look of awe tinged with irony as he contemplates a journey which continues to flow through him, and still surprises him with its capacity to flood his mind.
After a journey of thirty-six hours the Taiyo Maru entered the mouth of the Whangpoo River. Zalman noted the stillness of the water, its coffee-like texture, the bat-winged sailing junks littering the port. He saw families crowded upon the junks, their drying clothes hanging from makeshift lines. He saw barges bulging with coal, piloted by river-men whose faces were black with dust and sun-beaten toil. Freighters and liners edged to and from a drift of warehouses and docks. Single-oared sampans darted in and out like audacious dwarfs.
In the foreground he could hear the lapping of the water, a sound which seemed all the more alluring in the midst of so much noise. And there was the heat. He had never experienced anything like it before, a damp heat that dripped with fatigue and blunted the senses.
The Taiyo Maru rounded a sharp bend and came upon a riverside boulevard alight with trolley cars and rickshaws hauled by Chinese labourers on the trot. Coolies ran with loads bouncing from shoulder poles. The sun bounced off their lithe bodies, which were saturated in sweat. British and French overlords walked by, perspiring in formal attire. European-style buildings, opulent banks and houses of trade, adorned with domes and cupolas, arched windows and bas-relief pillars, towered over the thoroughfare.
As Zalman gazed upon this inferno of commerce, the Taiyo Maru anchored offshore. The Kobe refugees descended into motor launches and were transferred to the waterfront. It was the same at every border, that feeling of insignificance, of being at the mercy of uniformed officers bloated by their status and the power they wielded.
Even members of the Jewish refugee relief committees, on hand to greet them, seemed irritable. They directed the newcomers into open-sided trucks that lurched into the traffic of Shanghai. The convoy carried them past a sweep of consulates, onto the Garden Bridge over Suzhou Creek. A fleet of junks moved by, laden with timber and coal. Beyond the polluted waters they glimpsed the alleys that were to become so familiar in the ensuing four years.
The trucks slowed to a halt in the district of Hongkew. Just four years earlier, it had been the site of bloody battles fought between Japanese armies and the defending Chinese. The invaders rampaged through Hongkew in a fury. Up to a quarter of a million Chinese fell in the assault. As they retreated, they torched buildings that were about to fall into enemy hands.
The new Hongkew rose from the ruins, an insanity of makeshift houses interspersed with vacant lots covered in charred ruins and rubbish dumps. There were dwellings that seemed to remain frozen in a bloodstained past; doors hung from their hinges; breezes whistled through gaping holes. In the typhoon season, mud and water gutted the streets. In the summer months, the smell of food and refuse rose like poisonous vapour from the hardened earth.
Perhaps one hundred thousand Chinese lived in this dilapidated area, alongside an escalating population of refugees. In the late 1930s seventeen thousand Jews, denied entry to the rest of the world, had streamed into Shanghai. They had fled from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, from Vienna, Prague and Berlin, from towns and cities scattered throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.
They had journeyed by foot, on rail, by riverboat or automobile. They had dodged authorities, bribed officials, paid exit taxes, obtained visas by means fair or foul. They had crossed mountains, stumbled upon detours, rescued themselves from cul-de-sacs. They had grasped every slim chance to move closer to the one destination on earth where entrance papers were still not required. Until, at long last, they awoke to find themselves drifting along the Whangpoo towards the Shanghai river-port.
Like Zalman, many of them had been greeted by relief workers who sent them on their way across Garden Bridge, to their assigned places within an array of converted warehouses, factories, boarding houses and terraced cottages clinging to shabby lanes. They spent their first months in partitioned rooms crowded with double bunks, inhaling the damp night air or huddling under blankets to ward off the unexpected winter cold. Theirs was a fragile haven, built upon charity and foundations of blood; but it was a haven, nevertheless.
Yet, for Zalman, Shanghai remained a place of despair. This was the feeling that took hold of him as soon as he entered Hongkew. It was a thought that was to become an obsession during his four-year stay. More than half a century later all that remains are a string of images, random almost, punctuated by a number of crucial dates that marked the gradual erosion of whatever optimism Zalman still possessed.
At first he lived in a warehouse reserved for single men. Later he moved in with a family of three, from Warsaw—Hadassah, Yasha and their only son, twelve-year-old Chaim—who had managed to stay together on the entire journey from Vilna to Shanghai.
They lived in a windowless room in Hongkew, separated from adjoining cubicles by plywood partitions and curtains suspended from bamboo poles. Through the slim partitions could be heard the clatter of dishes, the shrill voices of couples arguing, the sounds of love-making, the echo of footsteps on the rickety wooden stairs. Seeping through the crevices came the smell of coal dust, of cinders and burnt straw, of fried foods and rancid oil, billowing from primitive stoves which provided just enough sustenance for the slum-dwellers to survive.
And, for a while, some of them thrived. The refugees moved freely in and out of the international and French concessions which still remained in European hands. Zalman found work in the offices of a Russian firm trading in furs. Chinese labourers, the universal underclass, salted weasel skins and mink. The treated furs were stored in warehouses for future export. Zalman co-ordinated the shipments, kept accounts and, when there was nothing to do, which was often enough, he would rest his feet on the desk, light a cigarette and lean back in his chair. Or he would lock the door behind him and stroll out onto the streets.
War-time Shanghai was a city sustained by speculation and wheeler-dealing, gambling and black marketeering. Shanghai was living on borrowed time.
‘You could feel it,’ says Zalman. ‘The city was unhinged. There were even buildings rising from concrete rafts which, in turn, floated on mud flats. In the side streets, abandoned children covered in sores ran in packs. Beggars tugged at your sleeves. I saw the desperation in their eyes. Those who were making a living hurried by. They did not look. They did not wish to see. Those well-off snuggled back in their cars on their way to the cabarets and private clubs.
‘But for some reason it has been my fate to detect the destitution beneath the gaiety; to be drawn towards it, to walk through it; to turn into Blood Alley, in the French concession, where drunken sailors staggered after streetwalkers. The sailors roamed the city in gangs. They crowded into dance halls in pursuit of “sing-song girls”. They drank and made merry, and lived each day as if it was their last. Yet to me they seemed like dybbuks, lost spirits in search of a warm body to possess so far from home.
‘As for Hongkew, it was a carnival of dybbuks. I wandered its streets, to and from my place of work. We were a kingdom of dung beetles, scurrying about, doing what we could to survive; and Hongkew was our dung heap. I would walk past Chinese families who slept in vacant lots. I stepped over dead babies wrapped in newspapers or bamboo mats. The morning air was permeated with the smell of our night shit dripping from sewerage tanks. Porters groaned as they hauled their carts. Women hurried to work with babies tied to their backs.
‘All the while, we continued to dream the dream of the displaced. A dream which stole through the narrow alleys of Hongkew in the early hours, when the noise subsided, and a shallow sleep overtook us: a dream of horizons and ports, of ample decks fanned by sea breezes.
‘The dreamers leaned against the rails. In their hands glittered the longed-for treasure, a visa to new worlds. They were sailing towards sanctuaries where the streets flowed with freedom. And they awoke to their dank cubicles, their crowded dormitories, and the rising cacophony of another futureless day.’
The cold rains descended, the north winds took hold and, in the early hours of 8 December 1941, Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. In the pre-dawn darkness Japanese troops lined Shanghai's riverside boulevard and launched an assault upon the sole US naval vessel, moored mid-river. They opened fire on the Royal Navy gunboat, the HMS Peterel, anchored further upstream. Outnumbered on all sides, the boat sank in flames. The river glowed in its after-light. Some of the crew were swept downstream as they swam for the shore, where they were captured, and ferried to the infamous Ward Road jail.
At dawn a squadron of planes released leaflets with the news that ‘an unfortunate state of war has come about between Japan and the Allies. Do not panic.’
As the Year of the Serpent drew to an end the refugees of Shanghai were too weary to panic. There was no longer any place upon earth to which they could run. The international concessions had fallen into Japanese hands. The prized city was firmly under their command.
During 1942 the refugees of Shanghai lived in limbo. Their fates were determined according to rapidly shifting definitions of nationality. Those with British, American or French passports were driven out of the city into internment camps. Russian emigres remained in the former concessions, free to work in businesses now transferred into Japanese control. And those who had, at first, escaped definition, those categorised as stateless, awoke on 18 February 1943 to radio bulletins proclaiming the establishment of a ghetto, in a ‘Designated District’ within Hongkew.
Wall posters echoed the news. All Polish, Austrian, Czech and German Jews who had arrived in Shanghai since 1937 had until 18 May to move into a forty-block area. Their movements were now monitored by Japanese troops, Sikh police, and a patrol of sentries drafted from the ghetto inmates.
Zalman spent his nights with Hadassah, Yasha and Chaim. They played chess and draughts, reminisced about Warsaw, shared their meagre rations of food. In the mornings, Zalman would leave his cramped quarters, descend the stairs, and move out into the streets of Hongkew. He returned to his incessant walking; and he knew what he was looking for: those crevices of solitude he had discovered during his walks in Kobe.
In the Shanghai of 1943 such moments were all but impossible to find. Japanese officers strutted about with the arrogant air that characterises occupying forces. The order which had impressed Zalman in Kobe gave way to random checks and indiscriminate beatings. A system of passes restricted movement to and from the ghetto gates. The streets of Hongkew teemed with children fossicking through rubble. Typhus and cholera, beriberi and dysentery claimed many lives. Others died of hunger, heat exhaustion and despair, while those without work sat day after day in ghetto coffee shops and played cards.
And through it all Zalman walked. He walked beside barbed-wire fences and past soldiers clutching bayonets. He walked the lanes of Hongkew, and beyond, into the city at large, whenever he was able to wrangle a pass from the Japanese police. He walked from dawn to dusk, day after week after month, and he returned each night to the windowless room that was his home. This was his one constant, a family, three people to whom he had grown close. But the room was oppressive. Zalman could not wait for the night curfew to end; he would often leave before first light.
It was at dawn that he came upon the image he was looking for. It emerged from a damp fog that lingered over Suzhou Creek. Boats hovered in the mist. A solitary junk moved by, weighed down beneath a mountainous cargo of hay.
On the banks of the creek, Zalman saw a figure trudging over a desolate stretch of earth. In his right hand he carried a birdcage. The old man came to a halt by a tree. He took off his jacket and hung it on the lower branches beside the cage. The trill of a songbird flowed through the bars.
The old man lifted his arms, lowered his upper body and bent his knees. His back remained upright as he glided from form to form, in a slow-motion dance that seemed to defy the routine laws of movement. His legs remained bent at the knee, so that his lower body seemed anchored to the earth, while his upper body floated free, like a bird in flight.
Zalman followed each movement intently. For a moment Shanghai stood still; and Zalman rediscovered his poise. It was a mere fifteen minutes before the Chinaman ceased his movements. Unhurried, he put on his jacket, retrieved the birdcage, and trudged back through the rising mist.
Then he was gone; and although Zalman returned, day after day, at the same time, to the same strip of waterfront beside the creek, he never saw the old man again. He had to content himself with the image. He could conjure it at any time; and with it came the comfort of knowing that such moments could still exist.
In June 1944, the first Allied air raids hit Shanghai. American bombers targeted warehouses, factories and munitions dumps with remarkable precision. By early 1945 the allied armies were well on the advance. Manila fell in February. Iwo Jima in March. By April, Chinese armies were turning their sights back towards Shanghai.
On a searingly hot July day in 1945, pedestrians on the streets of Hongkew would have glimpsed above them shafts of sunlight reflecting silver from the wings of American planes. A diamond formation of bombers broke away and veered towards the shore. Sirens signalled the alert. The planes streaked over Hongkew and tilted towards the intersection of Tongshan and Kung Ping roads.
Below them, Zalman and his adopted family joined a frantic rush of refugees into the corridors of a community centre. They had just finished lunch. They huddled in the corridors. Hadassah stayed behind in the kitchen. She remained wedded to her chores. Perhaps this is what saved her.
Zalman retains a clear picture of what ensued. He recalls conversations, word for word. He hears the muffled explosions. He sees the corridor, in detail, as it is thrust into darkness. He remembers the uneasy calm, riddled with dust. Zalman clutched at the man standing next to him.
‘Let go of me,’ said the man.
‘We are all covered in dust,’ said Zalman. ‘Look. Over there. There's a light.’
‘I am wounded,’ replied the man. And he turned, and ran.
Zalman saw two figures lying nearby. One was Yasha, his surrogate father. He lay motionless. The other, fifteen-year-old Chaim, was covered in blood.
‘I can't feel my leg,’ said Chaim. ‘Go and see how mother is doing,’ he added. ‘Tell her father is dead. Tell her I am wounded. Don't let her see me.’
Zalman rushed to the kitchen. ‘Yasha is dead. Chaim is wounded. I will take care of him. Just stay where you are.’
‘I will do as you say,’ Hadassah replied. Her voice seemed distant. She filled a bucket with water, seized a brush, sank to her knees, and began to scrub the floor. She scrubbed as if possessed. Zalman was struck by her calmness. She continued to work. She was bent over like a rabbi, lost in prayer, but when she briefly lifted her head, he glimpsed the horror in her eyes.
Zalman returned to the corridor. He lifted Chaim onto a door that had been blown off its hinges. A friend helped him carry the boy out to the streets. They barely registered the panic and the noise. They barely noticed the buildings in flames, the casualties laid out on blankets, the bodies scattered over the centre's vegetable garden.
Rickshaw drivers cleared a passage. At the periphery of his vision Zalman saw corpses strewn over the streets. He glimpsed his Chinese neighbours, as if from afar. They were running with sheets and shirts, towels and skirts, which they tore into bandages as they headed for the wounded.
The two men carrying Chaim were directed to a makeshift aid centre, hastily set up in the grounds of the Ward Road jail. Charred bodies lay beside the injured: men, women and children huddled together in the prison yard. Above them loomed watchtowers, barred windows and grey walls. Refugee doctors and nurses tended the victims.
Chaim was lifted off the stretcher. Zalman noted the massive wound in the abdomen. He saw the liver, exposed. A young woman, a doctor, knelt down by Chaim's side.
‘I will live,’ murmured the boy.
‘Leave him with me,’ said the doctor. ‘I will take care of him. And you?’
‘There is nothing wrong with me,’ replied Zalman.
‘You are bleeding all over.’
For the first time Zalman felt the pain, the numbness in his face. For the first time he observed his own wounds, the shrapnel, the patches of blood.
The doctor injected Zalman with anti-tetanus serum. ‘I will operate on the boy. Come back in an hour.’
‘I will live,’ murmured Chaim.
Zalman returned an hour later to learn that Chaim had briefly regained consciousness; he had died just minutes earlier.
A blazing July day in 1945. The war was all but over. Zalman had lost his second family. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing to hope for. There was no need to hurry. There was nothing to do but walk.