Cafe Scheherazade Read Free Page A

higher pay. One strike veered out of control; a gendarme was killed. The factory owner accused Yankel of the crime. Yankel was arrested and imprisoned in Pinsk. Etta was imprisoned in the nearby city of Kobrin; and it was in prison that their first child, a daughter named Basia, was born.
    Avram points to the letters. He extracts a yellowing page. The Hebraic script, penned by Yankel in a prison cell, within days of his arrest, is all but impossible to comprehend.
    The letter is addressed to his brother Shlomo in New York. Avram knows the contents well. Yankel agonises over his predicament. Should a revolutionary rear a family? he asks. When would I have time for a child? For the care and love she needs? And how will the family survive now that I have been sentenced to fifteen years labour so far removed from home?
    Etta was released from prison after serving six months; but Yankel was exiled to a Siberian work camp near the city of Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal. In winter it glistened white, a boundless sheet of compressed ice. In spring it melted into an inland sea of billowing snow. In summer the horizon linked lake and sky in one seamless vista of bleached blues. In the autumn, cold winds heralded another season of stagnant twilights and gale-swept nights.
    Yankel laboured and longed for the day when he would return to his grand obsession. Etta journeyed in his wake, thousands of kilometres east, with her new-born daughter, to Irkutsk. She obtained work as a nurse, looked after her infant child, and visited Yankel on the shores of Lake Baikal.
    â€˜She always carried the family on her shoulders,’ says Avram. ‘She was always both a breadwinner and revolutionary. She tended her husband, her children, her patients, and her comrades. She made time for everyone.’
    â€˜And Yankel?’
    â€˜He was a professional revolutionary. The party always carne first. When I was a child I rarely saw him. He was often absent at night, at a meeting, a conference, a Bund gathering. Sometimes he was away for weeks on end, on missions throughout Poland. He was always on the move, always organising and scheming. When he was in town he would visit me at school, in the mornings, and treat me to breakfast. This was our allotted time together. Of him it was said: “Where he stands he talks, where he sits, he sleeps.”’
    â€˜You are jumping ahead now,’ Masha warns. ‘One minute we are in Siberia, in Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal, ten years before you were born, and now we are in Vilna, twenty years later. Martin will be confused.’
    But I do not mind. I enjoy the asides. The hours flow through the winter night. Trams glide by, like whispers on wheels. Lights wink from restaurants lining the Street. A gentle rain slants down in transparent sheets. And Avram's lilting voice draws me back through the early years of a passing century.
    In 1914, Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. The tribes of Europe converged upon the battlefields. In the millions they fell, foot soldiers in the service of emperors whose dominions were about to be swept aside. In muddy trenches, amid the stench of decaying flesh, their bodies numb with fatigue, they battled over mere metres of ground. And wherever they fought, they sowed the unmarked graves of countless wasted lives, until those who still remained screamed: ‘Enough! Let the empire crumble! Let the old order die. We want bread! We want peace!’
    In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas was swept aside; and thousands of kilometres to the east, on the shores of Lake Baikal, Yankel Zeleznikow was pardoned and released from his Siberian exile.
    Towards the west they journeyed, Etta and Yankel, anxious to rekindle their life's work. They chose Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, as the city in which to resume their lives. They entered a city draped in red banners and flags. It was the alluring springtime of revolution. A time of soap-box orators, fiery speeches, messianic