Arnold Zable - Cafe Scheherazade

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 205 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 206 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, waistdeep, 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.

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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 208 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 he 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.

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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.