Arnold Zable - Cafe Scheherazade

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

"The criminals controlled the kitchens. They were well-fed. They bribed the guards who let them through the barbed-wire fences into the women's camp. They fell upon the women like wild beasts.

After all, they were full of energy and zest. But the rest of us had no interest in sex. When you are hungry, food is more erotic than sex. The memory of a Vilna 68

Sabbath stew was far more enticing than the most desirable of women.

"In our spare time we sat on our bunks and watched the criminals play cards. Mostly they did play for other people's boots or overcoats. The loser would be obliged to attack one of the political prisoners, grab his spoils and give them to the winner.

On one occasion they even played for their fingers. The loser stood up, took an axe, and chopped off a finger. I did see it myself.

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

Otherwise, the only certain exit was a grave, dug deep in the

Arctic earth.

"We did live in a world of our own. There were Tartars and

Uzbeks, Poles and Jews. There were Russians, Mongolians, Chinese and Africans, Gypsies and Armenians. And we got on quite well, mind you. We were in the same black hole together. Within weeks of our arrival, we all looked the same. We were dressed in the same rags. Our shoes were held together with wire. We were covered in sores. Our eyes were red, our faces unshaven. We were a mess of skin and protruding bones. At night many of us did stagger around with `chicken blindness`, 69 brought on by lack of food. And we smelt the same, of stale sweat and lice-infested rags.

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

Some dates remain indelibly carved in the mind. On 13 October

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

As he stood in the assembled crowd, Laizer was struck by the thought: what an odd word freedom is. Free to do what? To go where? Thousands of kilometres south-west stood the city of his loved ones, of his youth. He had not heard from them for two years. And somewhere in that vastness called the Soviet Union there were former comrades who, like Laizer, had disappeared on the trek east, in flight from the same inferno that had driven them from their homes.

Yes, he was free. And alone. The thought appealed to him in a curious way. To be alone was to feel light, to be stripped back to essentials, to a bare mattress in a three-tiered bunk, to his wired shoes and the rags on his back. But, at the same time, it brought back an almost forgotten ache, an ache he had 70 suppressed in order to survive an exile that seemed to have no end. This is what was so curious about freedom. It seemed so fragile.

The long descent began. The former prisoners were given a ration of food and put on board a barge that conveyed them through waters that had not quite frozen over. Along the Vorkuta River they drifted, through erratic currents and congregations of ice.

The land about them retreated against the encroaching darkness.

Mist-filled days became extended twilights which were engulfed by expanding nights.

Into the Pechora River the barge sailed, its bunks crowded with a cargo of freed slaves who had learnt, in the years of their imprisonment, to take each day as the first; who had come to realise it does not pay to get carried away by brittle hopes.

They were not surprised, therefore, when the barge master, fearing for his safety upon a river that was freezing over, guided his boat to the banks and ordered the passengers off.

The band of castaways set out on a trek along the banks of the

Pechora. In the days that followed, as their food supplies dwindled, and the cold took hold, there were those who fell by the way; and what Laizer recalls, above all, was the expression on their faces as they finally surrendered and gave way to the snow. Their eyes closed upon a smile that seemed to say: our journey has ended; we are out of this gehennim, but you, my dear comrade, you who still cling to life, who seem to think that there is an end to this madness, you must go on.

The ranks thinned. The larger band broke up into gangs. The 71 gangs roved the countryside. They rested during the dwindling hours of daylight, and moved on under the cover of night. They raided villages and farms. They stole food at knifepoint. They dug potatoes out of the cold earth. They swallowed snow to appease their hunger and thirst. And when, at last, they reached the railway tracks, they leapt aboard moving trains to steal supplies, and jumped off at the outskirts of kolkhozes, where they scoured the fields for the final remains of the autumn harvest.

"I cannot see continuity in my journey," repeats Laizer. "Only broken lines." We sit with our coffees in Scheherazade and we work in tandem to rejoin them. Laizer recalls a sojourn in

Sverdlovsk, a city in the central Urals, and a temporary job in a power station. He recalls days lived in a torpor, weeks during which he drifted, months on end when he merely existed.

In the spring of 1942, Laizer was drafted into the Red Army.

After a brief training period he was ordered to assemble with his unit at the Sverdlovsk station. One minute before they were about to depart for the front he was ordered out of his carriage. As he stood on the platform Laizer was divested of his rifle, his bayonet, his ammunition, and handed back his civilian clothing.

As a Polish citizen and former prisoner he had been judged untrustworthy to take on the duties of a soldier.

Laizer was assigned to a work battalion and dispatched by train in the opposite direction, towards the town of Serov. Again he journeyed north, three hundred kilometres through the Urals, the hinterlands of an empire at war. The tracks hummed through the dark, past remote hamlets and streams, 72 past shadowy forests and fields, over mountain passes and bridges scaling ravines.

The train moved by stations at which troops were assembling to be transported to the front. At one station Laizer glimpsed the injured en route home from the battlefields. He saw the bandaged limbs of amputees, the vacant eyes of those who had barely escaped with their lives. He sensed their anguish. He heard their collective cry, which vanished back into the darkness, reduced to snatches of conversation, the moans of disturbed dreamers, the mutterings of the sleepless.

The labourers of the work battalions lay in the crowded carriages, their bodies curled in upon themselves, as if in retreat from reality. They conjured the warmth of imaginary wombs, and relished their rare moments of respite, when constant movement and fatigue conspired to still even the most feverish minds. And Laizer realised that what he had mistaken for silence was, in fact, the crooning of the tracks, forever arcing towards an abyss; tracks which rocked and cradled the dispossessed, and evoked childhood ditties and lullabies; tracks which reverberated with the elusive voice of a mother singing: