In Acland Street, St Kilda, there stands a cafe called Scheherazade. Yes, dear reader, the question still remains: why did Avram and Masha choose that name? We have sat through long evenings, and greeted many dawns. We have met so many times, on Sunday mornings and week-day afternoons. We have seen the turning of the seasons, the passage of three full years. Nu?
‘It is simple,’ says Avram.
‘Not so simple,’ claims Masha. ‘First we should tell Martin how we left Poland. Actually, I did not want to leave Poland. I was happy in Lodz. I was studying to be a doctor. Instead I became a refugee all over again. A nobody’
‘For a time I felt the same,’ says Avram. ‘I thought we could rebuild our lives in Poland. But after the Kielce pogrom I was not so sure. I was sent there, in July 1946, as a member of a Bund delegation, to investigate. Out of a pre-war population of forty-five thousand, two hundred Jews had returned to Kielce after the war, from the Soviet Union, from the camps and places of hiding.
‘The police confiscated the pistols of the returnees the day before the pogrom. They had no means to defend themselves. Forty-two Jews were murdered in the assault. Our delegation was denied entry to the city, but I saw some of the injured when we returned to Lodz.
‘Their wounds were terrible. Some even had stiletto marks imprinted on their faces. They were attacked by a mob, by men clutching knives, and women who used their pointed heels as weapons. They battered their victims in a frenzy. When I looked at the wounded my old suspicions returned; and my bitterness, my rage.
‘Yet even then I wanted to stay. Not all Poles were anti-Semites. There were Poles who had saved Jewish lives. There were Poles who had been our comrades in the forest, or worked with us in the partisan underground. If I have learnt nothing else, it is this. No one has a monopoly over hatred. No one has a monopoly over suffering.
‘The final blow came in 1948 when the Communist Party absorbed the Polish socialists. We understood what this meant. Once the Bolsheviks came to power there would be no compromise. The Bund would become a prime target. We had no alternative but to escape.’
‘I was anxious to finish my studies,’ says Masha. ‘I had reached the fourth year. But I also had no choice. As a Bund leader in Katowice my father was in danger of being arrested. He told me if I did not join him in leaving Poland, the whole family would have to stay. I would have their lives on my conscience.’
‘We were under surveillance,’ says Avram. ‘For months we had been smuggling out our comrades and friends. Some stole out via the port of Danzig, over the Baltic Sea to Sweden; others fled via the Tatra mountains to Czechoslovakia. We had contacts in the Polish border police, a network of smugglers and supplies.’
‘I remember the day of our decision well: 25 May 1948, Avram's birthday. We were with a group of Bund comrades in an apartment in Lodz. They were all planning their escape.’
‘You see, Martin, there were two ways to leave Poland,’ says Avram. ‘Those of us who had been very active in the Bund decided to steal across the borders. But Masha's father tried the legal option. He wanted his family to remain intact. He had applied for, and received, official exit visas, a year earlier. He decided to leave openly.’
‘On that day, Avram's birthday, when he told me he was going to escape, we agreed to meet in Paris,’ says Masha, pursuing another tack. ‘It was then that there came to us the idea that we would celebrate our reunion in Scheherazade, as did the lovers in Remarque's novel. We would go to the nightclub and drink Calvados, the apple brandy that the lovers drank. It pleased us to think we were involved in a romance. It pleased us to think we were like characters in a novel. It lightened our burden. Besides, it was not certain that we would ever see each other again.’
Their hopes turned towards Paris. They fantasised a way out beyond their landlocked lives. At the centre of their imaginary map stood a beacon called the Arc de Triomphe. Radiating from the arch, like tracks of tinsel, sprawled the boulevards of a new dream. In their mind's eye they beheld dimly lit bridges rising from the River Seine. They saw themselves strolling over cobbled streets lit by lamps glowing like replica moons, or gliding in a carriage through the Bois de Bologne, the melodious clip-clop of hooves marking time within the shadows. They pictured the elegant decay of the Hotel International, its foyers reeking with stale carpets, its rooms layered with dust; and if its rooms proved to be too stifling, they could make their way to Scheherazade, a lover's retreat.
After all, despite all they had endured, Masha was twenty-one and Avram twenty-four, when they decided to leave Poland.
Avram left in mid-September 1948, when the first cold winds began to blow. The countryside lay resplendent under a veil of golds. Mid-morning frost rose from the earth. The land was spent, the harvest all but over; ochre haystacks and cow dung lay scattered over fallow fields.
There were six in the group: four men and two women. Comrades, toughened through years of struggle, buoyed by each other's company, and young enough to feel the thrill of intrigue. They were veterans, masters of stealth in times of danger. Each one had seen death many times over, felt its presence, inhaled its stench.
They journeyed by train south, from Lodz to Katowice. They squeezed into a taxi and drove deep into the Tatra mountains. They got out several kilometres from the Czech border, and moved on by foot, guided by a professional smuggler. They descended through a forest to a frontier stream, hid until evening, and waded across the border at night.
Many years later, what they would recall about this moment was not the fear, but their amused irritation as Avram chewed a bar of chocolate. The crackle of silver foil grated on their ears. It took a supreme effort to restrain themselves from breaking out into fits of laughter.
They crept over a strip of no man's land, and continued on, by foot, through the night, towards the Czech city of Bratislava. They approached its outskirts at dawn, joined Czechoslovaks on the way to work, and merged with the moving crowds. They made their way to the central station, and boarded a train to Prague.
They allowed themselves time to visit Prague's renowned synagogue, and the ancient cemetery that had miraculously survived the war intact, but moved on before the day was over. Now that they had set their sights on the west, they did not want to look back.
They entrained for Germany. They crossed over the Czech–German border with ease. For the first time they were not questioned. Their safe passage had been prearranged. They stepped off the train in Munich. Avram could not abide the thought of remaining there for even a day. Munich was the heartland of the former Reich. Dachau concentration camp was nearby; and just 160 kilometres to the north, stood the bombed city of Nuremberg.
A mere decade earlier the Nazi Party had marched over its cobbled streets. They held aloft banners of the eagle as predator. They had gathered, in their tens of thousands, on the outskirts, in the assembly grounds, on fields and runways where the Nuremberg rallies took place.
Whenever Avram saw men in uniform, whether railway bureaucrats or security guards, the passion for revenge shook his whole being. The final glimpse of his mother returned to goad him on. ‘Take care of yourself in the forest,’ she told him. And then she disappeared, amidst the barking of dogs, the screams of the wounded, arm-in-arm with her daughter, Basia, clinging to baby Nehamiah, clasping the hand of little Shmulek.
Avram moved on in haste. Now that the decision had been made, he did not want to endure a moment's delay. And there was something else: his longing for Masha, a girl with blue-green eyes. Only now that they were separated did he realise how intense this longing was.
He left the group and travelled on alone, west from Munich to Stuttgart, where he met up with a former comrade. Together they journeyed to the French border, guided by a smuggler. They hid in a cemetery until nightfall. The smuggler directed them to a church that stood against the border. They scaled a brick wall and Germany was behind them.
They made their way to the nearest station, boarded the final night train, avoided the gaze of conductors, and remained curled up on their seats, their faces concealed by the dark. Their imagined freedom was within their grasp. Yet the hours dragged by. They finally drifted into an uneasy sleep. They journeyed through one last night; and awoke to a sprawl of Parisian suburbs, radiant in the morning light. It was 23 September 1948: Avram would always remember the exact date.
The Frydmans left Poland in the first week of October, almost a month after Avram. They left together: Masha, her father Joseph, her mother Yohevet, her sister Sala, the entire family, except for her younger brother, Lonka, who had preceded them to Paris. They left with official exit visas, and four hundred books packed tightly in wooden crates.
At the Polish–German border, officers entered their carriage. They examined their passports, stared at their photos. Masha recalls her fear, her heart pounding, her helplessness before these uniformed men. As the Polish border police searched their bags, the Frydmans adopted the pose they knew so well; they shrank back in their seats, as if trying to become invisible. One suspicious glance, one word out of place, would have betrayed their cause.
Nevertheless, Joseph was arrested, and led away. No explanations were given. The three women were left stranded. They returned to Katowice.
For three weeks they made inquiries, knocked on doors, prowled the corridors, waited for hours in police stations and government offices, until they finally traced their father to the city jail. And their fear returned; an ancient fear, compounded by so many false exits. Years later, in Melbourne, this fear would surge up whenever Masha saw policemen in uniform. She would cross the street to avoid their gaze, and she would hurry away, as if to suppress the memory of the moment when, yet again, her dash for freedom was derailed.
In Paris, Avram counted the days. He felt Masha's absence as a burning ache. As the time for her scheduled arrival drew closer, his anxiety increased. He made his way to the Gare de Lyon with a fearful heart. As the train he believed she would be on drew into the station, he scanned each carriage, each exit in vain. All that arrived were the four hundred books.
When Avram learnt what had happened to the Frydmans, he decided to return to Poland. It was simple: he could not live without Masha. But it was a dangerous mission. He needed a false passport and disguise. He waited nervously for the passport to arrive. He wandered the streets of Paris driven by a feeling of dread. The city had lost its imagined appeal. The Arc de Triomphe appeared cold, a hollow colossus, sagging with defeat. The Eiffel Tower was a weight of naked girders streaking into leaden skies. The City of Lights was an inaccessible vision. Its cafes mocked him with their promise of companionship. Sounds of laughter grated upon his ears.
Avram became acutely aware of the other city, within the shadows. He observed the weary-eyed revellers, searching like robots for half-remembered thrills. He saw those who wandered alone, kindred spirits in search of lost love. His gaze was drawn to the flights of steps, which descended to the lower embankments and netherworlds.
He could imagine them all too well, the sewers that threaded beneath the city's elegant streets. After all, they threaded through his dreams; a recurring nightmare of a man forever crawling through shit, through the incessant dripping of urine and sweat, a man tunnelling through the city's intestines for a way out. The tunnels spiralled into dead ends. He did not know where they led. Or under which city he was burrowing. Was it Vilna or Paris? Or was it a nameless city where informers begged for mercy with the terror of death in their eyes, a city where those who made love at dawn were hanged before the day was out?
Yet even these nightmares were preferable to the dreams of loved ones he had lost. They appeared before him in a revolving procession. Basia. Yankel. Shmulek. Nehamiah. And Etta, with a scarf held tight in her hands. ‘Take care of yourself in the forest,’ she whispered. And in her place, like an apparition, appeared the face of a girl with blue-green eyes; her name was etched in the frost; and Avram was back in a room in Vilna.
He could hear the sounds of the mahogany piano drifting in from an adjoining room. A woman was playing; the keys flashed black and white like rotting teeth. Again he was disoriented. Was it his sister Basia playing the piano, or the girl with the blue-green eyes?
More faces appeared, at once distinct and vague; they vanished into the darkness from which they had emerged and in their place he observed faces of cruelty and stone, hovering over makeshift tables, barking orders, laughing.
Avram would will himself to awake; and he awoke alone, in the hotel room where he had imagined spending his first nights of consummated love. He glanced out of the window at a skyline of gables, spires and domes; a familiar skyline, his childhood Vilna writ large. He heard the hissing of the heating pipes, a cough in an adjoining room. He listened to the snarling of cats at war in a back lane.
Avram left his room and prowled corridors that smelt of stale cabbage and dust. Through a door, left momentarily ajar, he glimpsed a Russian emigre seated in front of an icon of his patron saint. The icon stood on an improvised altar, behind a solitary candle in which there flickered an ancient dream of return.
In a nearby room sat a circle of exiles, in flight from Franco's Spain. They were scanning newspapers from which they raised their heads to argue with each other. Or was it merely a futile attempt to pass time?
In the room opposite sat a grey-bearded Algerian, on the edge of his bed, his gaze fixed upon the wall. Who was he waiting for? How long had he been adrift? How long had he been spitting blood with each uncontrollable cough? Most likely he had made his way from the outposts of a dying empire to the City of Lights, only to find the doors locked; only to discover he was, after all, an outsider, an interloper from foreign shores.
In every room suitcases lay in corners, under beds, against walls. Some rooms had collapsible spirit-cookers, and a few odd utensils, a frying pan, a knife, a fork, or perhaps an all-purpose spoon.
The hotel was a universe of fading wallpaper and rickety chairs; of sagging mattresses in bare-boned rooms lit by a single bulb. There were times when every inmate, from the night porter to the last guest, seemed to be aflame with that exhausted longing so characteristic of the displaced.
As for Avram, his longing had been reduced to just one face. He ran his hands over his growing beard. He inquired daily after his fake passport. He spent his days at the Bund locale, where his comrades urged him to be patient. But at night he continued to steal through the streets, his mind ablaze with one thought. He barely registered the passing avenues, the neighbourhood squares, the dark waters of the River Seine. He was blind to the world about him. As he wandered, all he could see was the face of the girl with the blue-green eyes. With each echoing step, his longing mounted; and, with each passing night, the city seemed to mock him even more.
The three women made their way to the Katowice jail. The authorities refused them permission to visit Joseph. Masha travelled to Warsaw to plead on his behalf. After much persuasion and bribes, the Frydmans were allowed into Joseph's cell.
‘Do not wait for me,’ he urged. ‘Leave for Paris. I am sure I will be released. But do not wait. It is time to get out.’
It was both a plea and a command.
Masha, Sala and Yohevet resumed their journey west. It was as if they had never ceased travelling. They were back on the same rails that had held so much promise just seven weeks before. And they feared the worst. They travelled not knowing whether they would see Joseph again.
They arrived in Paris in mid-December. The streets were hidden under a pall of snow. The city was masked by a white silence. Avram was at the station to greet them; his fake papers were yet to arrive. But his reunion with Masha was now tainted by Joseph's absence. The couple greeted each other without a sense of triumph. They had been stripped of any desire to celebrate. They could not rest until Joseph was free. They spent their days exploring every possible option for his release.
Two months later, in mid-February 1949, Avram and Masha answered a knocking at their hotel door, and saw Joseph standing in front of them, suitcase in hand. He appeared like a phantom returned from the dead. His clothes were frayed, his eyes gaunt. He was unshaven. He looked exhausted. But he had survived.
Several weeks later, in the first month of spring, 1949, Masha and Avram set out for their rendezvous at Scheherazade.
They went to the nightclub by taxi. They stepped out at the Place Pigalle. Broad boulevards radiated a confusion of options. They circled the neighbourhood. They walked through a warren of streets littered with cafes and music halls.
Waiters beckoned passers-by into their bars. The sounds of an accordion drifted through an open door. Semi-naked women of the night scouted for clients, their powdered faces lit by the glare of neon signs. Avram and Masha glanced up at lamps blinking like mysterious beacons on the Montmartre heights. And, just as they were about to give up, they found it, below a flight of stairs, near the corner where they had first stepped out.
An attendant dressed in a Cossack uniform greeted them at the door. Masha and Avram walked through the pages of their beloved novel. They walked across a dance floor encircled by tables. Each table stood in a separate niche. Avram asked for a bottle of Calvados. First you must buy a bottle of champagne, the waiter explained, for a cover charge of eight thousand francs.
They emptied their pockets. They could barely pay the required sum. They sat for hours by one glass of champagne; they did not eat. Serenading violinists strolled by the tables. Avram and Masha sat in the spotlighted darkness, as a singer crooned Russian folk songs, ‘Katusha’ and ‘Dark Eyes’. It was a nostalgic charade which nonetheless revived memories of Red Army soldiers singing in the afternoon mists, of snow-bound steppes, and forests of conifers and birch.
They sat in the semi-darkness at a glass-topped table. Avram inhaled the scent of perfume. He closed his eyes and touched the warm hands of the girl with the blue-green eyes; he felt the tightness in his fingers give way.
Avram and Masha made their way to the dance floor. They danced to the music of a Gypsy orchestra. How long was it since Avram had yielded so easily to touch? How could he have known that this was what he had craved for in his years of exile and flight?
It would take years for Avram's anger to soften; but now he was dancing in Scheherazade, with its painted scenes of St Petersburg palaces, and cathedrals with onion-shaped domes. They danced in the shadows of lost childhoods, when the frost flowed with each breath. They danced to the memories of horse-drawn sledges, gliding over streets gilded with ice.
Masha drew close. Avram seemed to radiate the faint scent of resinous forests, the traces of his perilous journeys. As she danced Masha recalled her own journeys, a girl struggling, waist-deep, through a landscape of snow. A lone figure was stealing out into the Siberian night, beneath a sky vaulting with unknown galaxies and indifferent stars. Then she was back in Paris, in Scheherazade, warmed by her partner's touch; and she was moving across the dance floor, to the minor keys of a Gypsy violin.
Masha observed, as if for the first time, how young her partner was. His black hair was ample and thick, combed back in waves. She felt his strength; the body toughened by the hard earth on which it had slept, and the caches of arms it had hauled on forest raids.
Avram and Masha savoured the passing hours. They danced to the last strains of the violins, sipped their last drop of champagne, ascended the stairs, and embarked on the long stroll home.
They walked the avenues of the Pigalle past bistros where groups of men huddled over games of baccarat. They moved beneath street lamps that cast their lights on the branches of sycamore trees. Even at this hour, at least one light remained burning in each apartment building; a reminder that there was always life.
Avram took Masha's hand. He felt light. Unburdened. He was surging; in this moment he did not fear the sound of footsteps, nor did he imagine the whispers of stalkers moving in his wake. He marvelled at the events of this night. Scheherazade had not betrayed him. It was the first dream that had not betrayed him for many years.
Masha too felt light. It had been so long since she had first taken flight, since she had crossed the borders to the east, accompanied by the sounds of Red Army soldiers singing ‘Katusha’ on a winter breeze. Years later, she was still on the move, gliding along the Champs Elysees to the arch of forgotten triumphs.
Masha and Avram stopped by the tomb of the unknown soldier, with its eternal blue flame. They glanced at the single flower, a quiver of memory that someone had placed upon the grave. They strolled on aimlessly and descended to the lower embankments of the Seine. A barge drifted past lit by a solitary lamp. In the shadows lovers pressed close to each other, as if this night was to be their last.
And still they walked, Masha and Avram, hand in hand, through mazes of alleys and boulevards, in and out of silent courtyards, through visible layers of time. There were moments when Avram thought he was hallucinating. The sight of an arch, of serpentine streets and cathedral spires, and he was back in Vilna, retracing the footsteps of a child. Paris was so like Vilna, even down to the plane trees and chestnuts that had lined the avenues of his childhood strolls.
It was touch that brought him back, the gentle pressure of a hand. He glanced at Masha and, in the stillness of the pre-dawn, he saw the fierce determination with which she walked. She moved with the same sense of purpose she applied to all aspects of her life. And she saw, moving beside her, a troubled man; and again she knew it would be difficult. She had always known this, but for now they were lovers moving side by side, accompanied by the echo of their footsteps, by the harmony of their breath.
The dark gave way to the first light of a cool dawn. Avram and Masha entered the narrow streets of the Algerian quarter. Cleaners swept the gutters. Shopkeepers raised their steel-ribbed shutters. Carts trundled through cobbled lanes. Workers bent over bowls of coffee in run-down cafes. A Buick glided by, with a smaller Renault in its wake. Workers hurried to the Metro and descended its stone steps like miners disappearing into the earth.
Avram and Masha made their way to the entrance of their cheap lodgings. They climbed the wooden stairs to their single room. All the long years were now pared back to this room which lay beyond the cruel gaze of dictators. Here life could resume the unhurried rhythms of love, free from terror.
Avram lay in the afterglow of love. He glanced about the room, noted the chair draped by a dress, by a slip and discarded stockings, illuminated by the ascending light of day. Beside him lay Masha, asleep. He moved closer, and regained her softness, her warmth.
He got up and closed the wooden shutters, returned to the bed, ran his hand over her body again. The room was full of her presence. Yes, love was a physical presence, full-blooded, a definable force.
He had known variations of this presence once before. At Benedictinski 4. As he lay beneath an eiderdown, knowing that nearby hovered his protectors, his father who wove grand visions, and his mother who would enter his room, to tend to his illnesses, to make sure he was warm. This was Etta's only thought when she saw Avram for the final time. She wrapped him in her scarf, in her warmth. Then she was gone.
Avram rested his hand upon Masha's breast, as if to reassure himself she was not an illusion. He watched the rise and fall of her breath. He glimpsed the ascending sun through the slats of the shutters.
Their rendezvous was over, but their journey had not ended. They were, after all, ‘displaced persons’, still on the move. Before them lay many more months of waiting, the humiliation of meals in soup kitchens, the twice-weekly visits to the police, the eternal round of visa stamps, queues and interrogations, the nerve-sapping search for a home.
Before them lay many more walks through the City of Lights. They roamed Paris like children let loose at a fun fair. ‘Walking is cheap. Walking does not cost,’ they reasoned. ‘Walking is a way to pass time while our lives are still on hold.’
They came to know neighbourhood courtyards with children at play. They strolled over the Pont Neuf to the left bank, and sat in its cafes. For the price of a glass of soda they could sit for an entire evening at marble-topped tables, with their heads buried in Le Monde or Paris Soir, and pretend they belonged there.
Theirs was still a counterfeit life; and there were times when Paris seemed closed to them, leaving them stranded at its padlocked gates. Yet still they walked, even if it was on uncertain ground, from the left bank back to the right; they paused upon the city's bridges from which they gazed upon the Notre Dame, the cathedral of Our Lady. It reared in the night sky like a citadel, concealing stone pillars and cold vaults.
After nights of love-making the city would regain its radiance. It was in the small details that a world they had almost forgotten reappeared: leaves regained their veins; the waters of the Seine were a pageant of lustrous greens; a sudden ray of sun became a shaft of gold; the breeze a refreshing spirit; a cloud-ridden sky an ocean of silver-greys.
The rendezvous was over, but before them lay many more nights in that single room; spring nights scented with jasmine and budding blooms; summer nights laden with sultry skies, autumn nights imminent with storms; winter nights echoing with falling snow; full moon nights when tiled roofs shone and the city was cast in an unearthly glow; countless nights on which recurring stories gave way to silent dawns.
Yes, the rendezvous was over, and there were nights when other faces intruded. Faces contorted with cruelty. Unwanted faces that Avram could not tame. They dragged him back into the darkness, to the smell of terror, to the ache of his all-too-recent wounds. He wanted to interrogate them. He wanted to scream out the eternal why. And he would awake to his hardened breath; and the redeeming softness of Masha's presence. He would gaze at her, reach over and touch her; touch her hair, her face, her bare arms.
Yes, the rendezvous was over, and before them lay many nights when Avram recoiled from love. Nights when he retreated to the forests, to the memories he had concealed, to tales of partisans who fell upon their foes like enraged animals. They pointed their guns at cowering families, at the boy standing in front of his father, begging them to spare his life. At the mother, standing in front of her daughter, to shield her from their desire to rape; while watching them was a nineteen-year-old boy called Avram.
And only now, after so many nights in the back room of Scheherazade, do I see the first glitter of Masha's tears. Only now, after so many hours of self-control, does Masha speak of the moments when she had come across him, unexpectedly, or had approached him from behind, and laid a gentle hand upon his shoulder; and he had turned, with his arms raised, shaking with suspicion, ready to defend himself, back in the forests, alert like a wild animal to the stalking of a hunter; and he would turn on her as if she were a stranger.
Avram gently rocks at the remembrance. He stretches out a gentle hand to Masha. Touches her on the shoulder. And whispers, yes, she had to withstand so much confusion, so much rage.
We are drawn together, the three of us, in a circle of subdued light, and in that light, Avram and Masha seem transparent, fully revealed. Avram's hand is resting, softly, upon Masha's shoulder; and he is whispering ‘Yes, she had to endure so much. But, tell me, how could anyone come out of that gehennim whole or sane?’
Then we are back in Paris, where Avram's tales were absorbed in a lover's arms. Where the first child was conceived, born and bathed. Where love was first regained.
No. Scheherazade had not betrayed them. The Gypsy orchestra still awaited them. For the price of a bottle of champagne they could remain in the half-light, in the recesses, or glide to the strains of a violin; to the melodies of those who live on the fringes, who know both brutality and romance, who know that only in love can there be redemption, a permanent home.
Before them lay an ocean, and another voyage to an uncertain life, to a new world, and a new city, perched on its southern extremes; a city with a street crowded with cafes and restaurants based upon old-world dreams. And years later, when they embarked upon their audacious venture, what option did they have but to call it Scheherazade?