Free Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

lullabies; tracks which reverberated with the elusive voice of a mother singing:
    Oh come now, quiet evening,
    And rock the fields to sleep,
    I sing you a song of praise,
    Oh silent evening of mine.
    How still it has become,
    The night has finally come,
    The little white birch tree,
    Remains wrapped in darkness, alone.
    February in Melbourne can be the wildest month. A hot northerly wind is gusting. It raises dust from the pavements, and whips sand across the foreshore. It caps swirling wavelets with foam, and spins buoys, yellow and red, into twirling tops. It lifts late summer leaves and pine needles from the gutters. It upturns outdoor tables and chairs, and hurls beach umbrellas from their moorings.
    A gang of teenage boys huddle about their ghetto-blasters on a strip of grass above the foreshore. A cormorant struggles to stay aloft. Bathers lie spreadeagled in the shallows. An addict, lost in a heroin fix, dances beneath a palm, while her partner sways in her shadow, a beer can in each hand.
    And Laizer walks the usual route, from his St Kilda flat to the cafe. His face is flushed. His nerves are frayed. The upper buttons on his shirt are undone. His shock of thinning white chest-hair bristles in the wind.
    He moves from the foreshore beyond The Esplanade, to Shakespeare Grove; rounds the corner into Acland Street. He approaches the two palms, on either side of the road, recently planted, fully grown. They are two sentinels, keeping guard, he remarks to himself, aloud. He has almost reached his goal. The neon oasis is drawing him on. He is running as he bursts through Scheherazade's doors.
    â€˜You see, Martin, you no-good scribbler?’ he says, breathless, as he sits down beside me. ‘Listen to those winds. Even here, in the golden land, we are just a breath away from chaos.’
    Laizer is nervous. He cannot sit still. He stands up, paces about, returns to his seat. It will take time for him to settle down. I know the pattern well, his approach and retreat, his desire to withdraw, his conflicting need to tell. But today, more than a month since I last saw him, the contrasts are harsher than usual. The north winds are on the prowl. They are our sirocco . Our hamsin . The closest our city possesses to a desert wind.
    The airconditioner hums. The cool has set in. Laizer's nerves are settling. He is calm enough to sit still; and to smile. Laizer is as warm as the north winds, but far more generous. Once a friend, he will remain a friend. A khaver . A loyal companion. After all, I have accompanied him on quite a journey now and, for this moment, at least, we are both no-good bastards taking shelter from the same winds.
    Laizer describes northerly winds of a far different kind. They whirled like dervishes, in savage tornadoes of snow. They hurled hailstones into the eyes, and gnawed at the nerves with ice. ‘Martin, you are a writer, but words cannot capture it. It is impossible. You feel nature lashing you, laughing at you. You become a nothing. Your body is a mere bag of bones.’
    Laizer recalls it as a time of taunting beauty, the twenty months he worked on the ancient trading route called the Vizir. For over a century the route had snaked, twenty metres wide, through the forests of western Siberia, hundreds of kilometres east, from Serov to Tobolsk.
    In summer the path was submerged in impassable bogs and swamps, littered with fallen trees and encroaching forest. Russian merchants travelled the Vizir in winter. Horse-drawn sleds conveyed their merchandise in search of ‘the easterners’, hunting tribes of the taiga who exchanged furs for axes and ammunition, animal skins for vodka and tobacco. The sleds returned with the raw coats of arctic reindeer and silver foxes, polar bears and Siberian tigers.
    Laizer delights in this history. The terrain was so difficult that the route was broken every thirty kilometres by stations where the merchants obtained fresh supplies and horses. Over time, the