Cafe Scheherazade by Arnold Zable

Author:Arnold Zable
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC019000, FIC051000
ISBN: 9781921799457
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2003-03-31T05:00:00+00:00

Even as we sit and drink and argue and talk at the tables of Scheherazade, even as I continue to listen to their tales, they are moving on, the old men. One by one they are going. Every few weeks I hear of another death. I have been drawn into their collective fate. I follow them to the cemetery that sprawls at the southern fringe of the city, an hour's drive from the cafe.

I have farewelled them in all seasons now: on spring days, following the funeral bier along paths sprouting weeds and errant flowers. On days of summer heat, over paths hardened and parched. On winter mornings under skies sagging with clouds, the mud sucking at the shoes, the gravesides sodden with clay. And on autumn afternoons, the sun low on the northern horizon, the paths gilded with plant decay.

The cemetery stands on a flat plain. To the north rise the hills of the Dandenong Ranges. On clear days they appear like cardboard cut-outs, lit up in startling focus against expansive skies. On such days I glimpse the final irony in the old men's journeys, the final twist in the tale.

They had come from the old world to the new to remake their shattered lives. Yet it can be sensed, by their gravesides, that this too is an ageing land; worn low by geological time into wooded hills and basalt plains, its features suffused with its own peculiar light which illumines the rabbi intoning the funeral rites.

His voice dissipates in the wind. Eulogies evaporate mid-air. One by one old friends step up to shovel the freshly dug earth over the pine casket. Those that step back converse quietly in this moment of suspended time.

As the mourners depart, two attendants complete the task of covering the grave. Within minutes all that remains is a mound of earth topped by a wooden stave. The crowd has dispersed. A generation is moving on. And with each passing life I feel it more keenly: there are tales aching to be told, craving to be heard, before they too disappear into the grave.

So I return to the cafe, to the remaining storytellers, to listen and record. To inscribe and pass on. And, in so doing, to add to the mythology of an ancient land.

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