Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

seem real. They travelled in comfort. The train was heated. Conductors served hot tea. Those with extra money could purchase vodka as they dined.
    Zalman was lulled into a reverie, broken occasionally by a glimpse of stations flitting by. He glanced at the sides of railway tracks along which prisoners trudged under armed guard, their heads bent, their shoulders drawn, their eyes fixed in a helpless gaze. It was a fleeting vision of hell; a brief encounter with the other side, followed by darkness, the pulse of the train, the curving of rails in a rhythmic refrain.
    The passengers alighted for an hour in Novosibirsk, deep in central Siberia. The platform seemed deserted. Zalman walked towards the waiting rooms. Without warning he was among crowds of people. They milled about like robots. They moved slowly, as if lost.
    Whenever they glanced at Zalman, envy flickered in their eyes. He was well dressed, while they were in rags. He walked with a sense of purpose, while they shuffled aside to let him pass. Others remained squatting on the platform, hunched over their luggage, as if guarding their meagre possessions with their lives. In their eyes, Zalman was from another world. He sensed it, and wanted to reach out and touch them. But instead he recoiled in fear and hurried away.
    Day became night became day, and on the following night they moved beyond Irkutsk, along the cusp of Lake Baikal. The lake was covered in ice that glowed under a full moon. The ice shone with blue-white light. There was enough light to read by. Zalman would never forget the details of this night, its stillness, its clarity, the full moon rising above an inland sea.
    He stood alone. His fellow passengers were asleep. There was a keenness in the air. In that moment he felt a surge of joy, a subdued excitement. He was on the way to the unknown, yet, as the train drifted by Lake Baikal, he did not care. He did not wish to be elsewhere. He wanted this moment never to end, this moment of journeying in solitude, through calmness, past an unknown sea illumined with lunar light.
    At the end of the line loomed Vladivostok, a port city squatting on the eastern rim of the empire. The passengers arrived towards evening and were ordered to remain in their seats. They felt uneasy. Troops patrolled the platform. There were rumours that their visas were invalid, talk of last-minute cancellations. ‘We will never leave Russia,’ whispered some. ‘We are trapped,’ murmured others. ‘How could we have believed we would be able to escape?’
    It was still dark when Zalman and his fellow passengers disembarked. They were ferried in buses to the wharves. The city remained a shadowy presence on the periphery of their vision. Here and there they registered the twinkle of lights and street lamps. Before them stretched the black waters of the bay.
    The passengers were hurried towards the wharves. They cast their eyes down so as not to meet the customs police's gaze; and they kept quiet. It was the silence of those who have lost the power to determine their fate.
    As a grey dawn broke out over the harbour the passengers boarded a Japanese freighter, manned by a Japanese crew. A Russian officer stood by the boarding plank. Zalman presented his documents. The officer tore off the Russian transit visa, and in that instant, Zalman felt it with a startling certainty: this was the moment of no return. He had been severed from the past, from friends, family, and all he had known. He was adrift. He was a refugee. He would always be a refugee.
    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