Cafe Scheherazade

by Arnold Zable

  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 f
ate. 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 susten
ance 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.