Free Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable Page A

stations became hamlets. Each hamlet expanded into networks of extended families. When the children intermarried it was the custom for the woman to live in her husband's hamlet. The hamlets grew into villages that bore the name of the principal family. After the revolution the villages had become kolkhozes, co-operatives that retained the family name; and life continued, as it had, for many generations.
    For those twenty months, Laizer moved east along the trading route with his work battalion, constructing towers for the Red Army. The towers were to be used to survey the terrain and determine the impacts of climatic change. There were fourteen workers in all: Russians and Ukrainians, Gypsies and Chechens, an Ingush and an Armenian; a disparate band welded by fate into a close-knit gang of frontier men.
    They built makeshift roads. They dragged sleds weighed down with equipment through mosquito-infested swamps. They covered the swamps with logs to ease the way. They axed the timber into precise lengths, ready to assemble into the towers' pyramidal shape. They cut down ageing trees with which they built shelters over the ice. They slept on branches of silver birch. They spread layers of soil and moss for insulation. A permanent fire burnt at the entrance. In summer the fire smoked out mosquitoes; and in winter it provided warmth and inspired stories.
    What else was there to do on long winter nights when the sun set within hours of rising? The labourers exchanged tales by a fire accompanied by the wailing of a wolf, the hoot of an owl, a sudden gust of wind. They talked about their years in prison camps, their children, wives, lovers and squandered lives. They were the heirs of a revolution that had promised so much, yet delivered so little. They had once imagined future riches, but now they lived for each passing day.
    Yet there were moments which caught them unawares, and overpowered them with their beauty. More than half a century later Laizer was to recall such a moment with hallucinatory clarity.
    At dawn, on a winter's day, while on the way to work, he had come across a village suspended from the sky. Snow had fallen through a breezeless night. It clung to the eyebrows and eyelashes, to his beard and rotting gloves. It contoured the trees, the cottage chimneys, the village wells and angled roofs. It engulfed every protrusion: a solitary nail, a leaning shovel, an abandoned broom.
    Frozen particles floated about him, alight against a crimson sun. A strand of smoke rose from each chimney, pencil-thin, into a rouged mist. And, on these glowing strands, the village seemed to hang between the reddened sky and snow-clad earth.
    Laizer knew it was an illusion, but he felt elated nevertheless. He could hear the faint song of creation, or so he allowed himself to believe. This is how things really are, it seemed to murmur. This is the perfection that underlies the chaos. This is what lies beyond the veil of suffering, beyond the betrayal you call life.
    The melody ceased. The sun broke through. The village sank back into the white. Laizer stood for a moment longer, reluctant to let go; and was overcome by a profound sadness. He looked down at his ragged clothes; and felt the pangs of hunger returning, the frost flowing back into his bones.
    The beauty of that image could not save him. It could not take away the pain of longing, or restore him to his loved ones. The contrast was cruel: so much beauty set against the reality of his enslavement. The universe was, after all, detached. It had lifted him so high, only to cast him back into the cold; and there was no lasting support that could cushion the fall.
    Laizer turned and resumed his reluctant journey, through the forests, back to his work brigade, to another day of labour in a Siberian glade.
    Laizer wipes the perspiration from his brow. He finishes his coffee, and orders another. He stirs in a teaspoon of sugar. A second. And a third. His forehead is creased in concentration. On