His only security was his fellow passengers, the three hundred or so he had travelled with from Vilna. They were the last constant. They were exhausted and disoriented. They hovered on the brink of the unknown. But they were together, a herd of kinsfolk, assembled by chance. And in this they found comfort.
Zalman seems like a man permanently perplexed. He sits in Scheherazade on a week-day afternoon. Again he sips his coffee slowly, savouring the taste, savouring his thoughts, devouring the sun that pours through the window. In the years of his retirement, this is what he loves most: to savour, to take his time.
âOur centre of gravity had shifted,' he tells me. âThis is what I sensed as I stood aboard the boat on the day of our departure. The sailors loaded it with freight. Their cargo included a herd of horses. They were led aboard just as we had been, hours earlier. You could see their confusion and fear. We were no different. We were merely animals being shunted about. And our centre of gravity had shifted: away from Poland, Russia, Europe, away from our childhood homes.
âTo this day, I no longer have a centre of gravity. I feel rootless. I will always feel rootless. I had been stripped of everything. Of the scent of my youth, my known way of life. And there is a certain advantage in this, a certain freedom. Even today, though I have lived in Melbourne for over fifty years, I have no sense of belonging. I am acutely aware that everything is temporary in life, a mere bridge. One does not build a house on a bridge. Instead I find my true home inside. I escape inside and I can go wherever my fancy takes me.
âYou have a taste for champagne, but a pocket only for beer. So the saying goes. But I have enough imagination to make beer taste like champagne. This is the great gift I received. Through losing everything, I became free.
âI no longer care for anthems, and I no longer care even for nations. They too are transient. The truth of who we are lies elsewhere, in the way we order our inner lives as we drift over unknown seas.
âIn losing everything, I have come to value everything: to savour this cup of coffee, its warmth, its aroma, to savour my walks by the sea, and this moment with a friend, at a table in Scheherazade. What more is there? Can you tell me?'
The Japanese freighter weighed anchor towards evening. Fragments of debris floated by. Ice breakers swept the bay. The lights of Vladivostok blinked as the vessel moved away. Zalman was afraid he would be sick. But the sea was smooth. The gentle rocking of the boat soothed him.
As they headed out into the darkness Zalman descended into the hold. It was divided by aisles that threaded between rows of straw mats. Passengers lay on the mats. Some were lost in sleep. Others stared at the ceiling. In a dark corner a bearded man, in a black caftan, rocked back and forth in prayer.
Zalman lay down on a mat and fell asleep. He slept deeply. He awoke feeling sick. It was still night. His head ached. His whole body ached. He staggered out onto the deck and vomited. He crawled back onto the straw mat, fell asleep and awoke again, hours later, to a cool sensation on his lips. A fellow passenger was feeding him a slice of apple. He smiled. Zalman has never forgotten that smile or that act of kindness from an older man. A wiser man. Zalman ate the apple and fell back into the darkness.
He awoke again at dawn, and climbed the stairs to the deck. The sea was as smooth as a table. On the horizon he could make out the coastline of Japan. Pine trees rose above distant dunes. The boat floated on a sedate sea. He stood there for hours; he did not know for how long. He had to tear himself away to descend for breakfast.
Zalman returned to the front deck in the late morning. The sun was high. The coast was approaching. He could see forests, fields, wooded hills, a port, and the entrance to a bay. And he thought, âI am entering the land of Madame Butterfly.'
The Tsuruga wharf drifted towards him in a tranquil dream. Zalman saw the town, its streets lined with wooden houses the colour of teak. He focused on one house. He saw a door. It slid open and he saw a woman in a kimono. She flitted by on wooden clogs. Then she was gone. But in his imagination she remained a luminous presence, a glimpse of the unknown, a Madame Butterfly.
Zalman yearns for peace of mind, but unresolved questions remain, the feeling that he is still on a journey over which he has long lost control. He returns again and again to the moment when he farewelled his loved ones in Warsaw and fled towards the east.
Somehow it was too hasty. There was not time to stop, to register the last image of his mother, the last words of his father, the final sight of familiar streets. How was he to know that it would be forever? This is what has nagged at him for over fifty years. His life has been one long journey away from certainty.
And there is something else. Call it a sense of guilt, perhaps. Call it paradox, an uneasy admission; but there were moments of unexpected elation as he journeyed away from Vilna, moments when he felt an intoxicating surge of freedom. Never was this feeling stronger than on the day he first glimpsed the land of Madame Butterfly.
On the following morning, at dawn, he was escorted from the freighter onto the wharf and through the deserted streets of Tsuruga. They walked, a party of three hundred or more, through the sleeping town. They walked along narrow streets lined with rows of wooden houses. Miniature bridges looped over cement ditches to the entrance of each dwelling. A lone woman swept the street in front of a store. Two fishermen trudged to the beach front, their nets draped over their backs. Behind the town loomed hills over which the sun had yet to rise.
Their lives were in the hands of customs officers and railwaymen, of Japanese authorities and Jewish relief workers who directed them through the gates of the station. They marched to the end of a platform and, exactly on time, to the very minute, the train arrived.
The doors opened. The refugees filed in and sat down, each one on a seat of their own. This is what struck Zalman, the efficiency, the precision, the politeness; and cleanliness. More than ever he felt as though he was moving in a dream.
The train crawled over mountain passes. Zalman caught glimpses of cascading waterfalls and gorges. He saw pines bent back by centuries of wind. He saw fields criss-crossed with flooded paddies. Peasants stood in the fields, dressed in high boots, colourful blouses and pyjama-style pants. He saw women with white headscarves and sashes tied around their waists. He glimpsed clusters of cottages, their tiled roofs cast in mauve and turquoise tints. He saw the ruins of a castle, the lush gardens of a villa. He caught sight of wooden temples, and pilgrims gathered about a shrine.
The train approached industrial complexes smudged with smoke. Open fields gave way to city thoroughfares and milling crowds. The train slowed to a halt, the doors parted. The refugees filed out. They were met on the platform by relief workers who escorted them out of the station and through the streets of Kobe.
They walked under a winter sun, stateless men and women in transit. They walked exposed to its glare, unaccustomed to the light, their eyes blinking. They walked in their crumpled clothes, the shabby suits they had worn since they left Vilna.
Among them walked yeshiva boys in black pants, white shirts and narrow-brimmed hats, clutching prayer books wrapped in embroidered bags. Beside them walked rabbis clad in black satin coats, and a scattering of children, the girls in head kerchiefs and frayed dresses, the boys in knickerbockers and worn jackets. The children moved hand-in-hand with selfappointed guardians, or with their mothers and fathers, those numbered few with families intact.
Mostly they were single men who, like Zalman, could not erase the faces of dear ones. These were the images that plagued their minds as they ascended a steep incline. Below them, coming into view, was yet another harbour. The vista expanded as they climbed. The harbour was crowded with gunboats and freighters.
The bay glowed under a sheen of silver. The strip of foreshore extended inland, several hundred metres flat, before ascending into the hills up which they trudged. They moved past houses flying the flags of France and Britain, of Switzerland, Denmark and Norway. They were in the international quarters, among the homes of merchants and diplomats, wealthy traders and shipping agents.
As they climbed, Zalman was overwhelmed by a sense of wonder. The entire day had been a reverie. He had been entranced by the beauty about him, the symmetry. He had been seduced into a sense of security, of being in capable hands. He had journeyed through a land of strange gods and fast-flowing streams. Yet, like so many of the men about him, he could not forsake the thought of those they had left behind with the promise of better days.
They still clung to that hope. They talked politics incessantly. They clutched at every possibility. They fantasised about moving to America, Australia, Canada or Palestine. At night they lay on tatami mats and conjured impossible futures; and they arose each morning from the homes the Jews of Kobe had rented for them, within the European settlement, and descended to the community centre.
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 âhome', 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.