Scraps of Heaven (15 page)

Like many of the previous occupants he had been welcomed, straight off the boat, on Station Pier, by representatives of the welfare society, and driven in a motorcade to a banquet in the Kadimah hall on Lygon Street. They sat at tables covered in white cloths scattered with plates of sandwiches and honey cake, bottles of soda water and wine. They had arrived in ‘a land of opportunity', ‘a true democracy', a succession of speakers assured them. They had made it to a utopia!

After the meal they were escorted to the welfare house, and the following morning Bloomfield had stepped out onto Drummond Street for the first time. The streets were too wide, the asphalt too hard underfoot. He feared the open space, he feared himself. All he could do was keep his eyes focused upon his feet and take the first steps.

And years later he embarks, yet again, on the familiar route. He glances at the two-storey terrace opposite. Its date of birth, 1888 AD, is embossed upon the nameplate. Fifty metres on cars are drawing up at the Yiddish Sunday school. Children are arriving, parents gossiping. Bloomfield hears snatches of Yiddish, accented English, an array of Slavonic tongues. Josh is playing down-ball against the whitewashed wall.

When Bloomfield is well beyond the school the streets regain their Sunday quiet. He follows the trajectory of leaves in flight. Some land in the gutters and merge with clusters of leaves that form a continuous line. He takes off his overcoat as he walks. Beneath the feet all cities are alike, he reasons. He wonders what came before, what lies beneath the surface, where the lava had cooled into a basalt plain. He sees the bitumen as a layer of skin, brittle and thin. Easily impressed upon.

He looks at his lower arms. The veins and arteries are like the cracks in the pavement. He glances at his hands, his bare knuckles, the creases in his fingers, his sinewy bones; and deflects his thoughts to the ornamented facades. There are stucco trims, brickwork patterns, parapets embellished with urns and scrolls. A lion's head sprouts from an angled pediment above a front door. Bloomfield turns from Drummond into Macpherson Street. On the corner of a lane rises a brick wall.

The aroma of bread is in the bricks. The shop behind it was once a bakery, and ten years after it closed down, the smell of yeast endures. For the most part it remains dormant. It requires the sun to release it. Bloomfield inhales and touches his cheeks. He feels the stubble, his new growth. He allows the rays to open his pores.

On the corner of Amess and Macpherson stands the Returned Servicemen's Hall. A meeting is about to begin. Ex-soldiers are filing in. Bloomfield recognises Sommers. He has often seen him seated on the verandah of his Canning Street home. Sommers leans against a streetpole, pipe in hand. His former comrades have gathered to discuss the annual Anzac Day march in six days' time. Their regimental banner is propped against the wall, unfurled in the morning sun.

Bloomfield veers from Macpherson into Canning Street. He notes ‘the quintuplets' over the road, five two-storey terraces with identical balconies and cast-iron balustrades. Each possesses arched windows and six stone steps that ascend from street level to the doors. In one block alone there are bay windows, sash windows, rectangular windows, and windows with wrought-iron guards.

As he walks, Bloomfield mouths the names of the houses with embossed nameplates: Waverley, Swansea, Carnarvon Cottage and Illingworth. He crosses Fenwick Street and pauses at the quartet of cottages beside Boucher's corner store: Millcare, Southwick, Harrow and Meadow Vale. Many houses in nearby streets have been labelled with place names: Rochester, Derwent, Surrey, Kent, names that evoke ancient longings for distant hearths.

Bloomfield makes his way through Curtain Square to a park bench facing Rathdowne Street. The sun has moved north, beyond the equinox. At this time of year it is the only side of the square that receives the morning sun. Each day, and each time of day, has its peculiar sound. On Sundays, mid-morning, the city remains hushed. Individual sounds resonate: the far-off whisper of a tram, the notes of a piano tinkling through the open door of a nearby house.

The playing is hesitant. Perhaps it is a child practising her scales. The scales and arpeggios give way to a tentative song. The fingers are still finding their way, and with the melody comes a voice that sings: ‘Speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing, Over the sea to Skye.' Perhaps it is the pianist who is singing, or a woman standing by her side. The voice is not well trained, and more poignant because of that. Bloomfield sinks back, closes his eyes, and allows the sun to warm his face.

Zlaterinski paces up and down, clutching a thick volume in his hands. Its covers are grey, the spine torn. As he strides in front of the class, the spine flaps. ‘Sholem Aleikhem was a giant,' he asserts. His eyes are bulging. They are the eyes of a true believer, a man on a mission. Sunday morning is his time, and the Yiddish school his stage. He seeks the eyes of each student with his gaze. He returns to his pacing and resumes his harangue. ‘Yes, he was a giant, the Yiddish equivalent of Mark Twain, and this is his most important story. Mottel, the cantor's son, is fleeing Russia. He crosses the border.
Ganvenen di grenetz
, to steal across the border, is the key phrase. Only a genius like Sholem Aleikhem can conjure such golden words.'

‘Ganvenen di grenetz,'
repeats Zlaterinski, emphasising each word. ‘We all stole across borders, but Sholem Aleikhem's characters joked as they ran for their lives. Sholem Aleikhem was able to poke fun in the darkest of times. This is why one hundred thousand immigrants attended his funeral, in 1915, in New York, on the Lower East Side.'

Zlaterinski clasps fistfuls of pages, flips through the book, and settles upon a story.
‘Mir iz goot, ikh bin a yossem,'
he reads. ‘I am blessed, because I am an orphan. Can you imagine? Mottel rejoices at being an orphan? But tell me, what choice did he have?'

Josh glances at his textbook. He admires the elegance of the Hebraic script. It embodies the allure of archaic worlds. He can decipher its surface meanings; he is mastering the code. And he is beguiled by Zlaterinski's words, the melodic flow of the mother tongue.

Yet Josh is suspicious. Zlaterinski is a preacher. He dictates. He thunders. He lectures and struts. He flits from story to story and raises his voice to a shout. And Josh is wary of the script. It is redolent of stained blotting paper and bearded men clad in black.

His thoughts drift elsewhere. He gazes through the second-floor window. She is surely out there, the Swedish Girl. He imagines her strolling by, breasts tight against her sweater. The thought adds lustre to the streets. He pictures her as he had seen her, in his dreams the previous night. She is advancing towards him, skirt swaying, head held high. And that knowing smile. This is how he sees her, always at ease and in control of her charms.

Zofia dips a mop into a bucket and scrubs the pigeon droppings from the verandah. The pigeon watches her from its perch on the electricity meter beside the front door. Zofia hauls the bucket to the backyard. She returns with a bowl of water in one hand, a plate of wheat in the other, and lowers them beside the doormat. The pigeon swoops from the meter to its morning meal just as Bloomfield walks by.

On an impulse Zofia invites him in. He hesitates and glances around as if someone is watching. He is acutely aware of his movements, anxious not to offend. He opens the gate and climbs the stairs to the verandah with measured steps. The pigeon eyes him warily, then, as if deciding he is no threat, returns its attention to the wheat.

It is late morning. The house is silent; Romek is out visiting old-world friends. Bloomfield follows Zofia inside. The scrape of his tread upon the linoleum grates upon his ears. He is relieved when he advances onto the carpet in the dining room.

The Sunday meal is in the oven, the kitchen smells of roast, but the smell of the street is stronger. It emanates from Bloomfield's clothes. He remains standing, as if stranded, while Zofia brings the kettle to the boil. Only when Zofia serves the tea does he accept her offer of a seat, but he does not remove his overcoat.

They sit by the table, bent over cups of tea. Bloomfield props his elbows and cradles the cup in both hands. Zofia glances at him as he looks up. They have been caught, unawares. And in that instant they recognise, instinctively, that they are both without guile; incapable of cold calculation, of doing each other harm.

Bloomfield now looks at her as if seeing and not seeing at the same time. His teeth are stained. His face has crumpled into a web of creases. They congregate by his eyes and mouth, and extend lengthwise over his cheeks. His skin has been burnished by years of exposure to sun, wind and rain, yet retains a vestige of smoothness. His clothes are frayed, but regularly washed. The stains can never be removed, but the smell does not overwhelm.

Yes, he is without guile. Zofia detects it in the timidity of the childish smile that eases into his face. She recognises it in his gentle rocking, his subtle movement forwards and back. She sees it in the neutral greyness of his eyes. And he knows what she knows, has seen what she has seen, has lost what she has lost. He has supped from the same bitter cup. He is a man she can trust. And she hears herself say,
‘Keiner farshteit undz nisht.'
No one understands who we are.

The words emerge, unbidden. They barely break the Sunday silence, but they linger. They cannot be taken back. She returns to the oven and checks the roast. There is a certainty in her movements born of years of domestic service. She is well schooled in kitchens and interiors. She glances at the enamelled image of the kookaburra on the oven door. It sits on a twig, beak tilted upwards, expectant.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums.

Zofia is startled by his delayed reply. His voice is constrained, but his ‘yes' is elongated; his singsong hum, inviting. The kookaburra laughs.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums.

On his face there is a childish smile. His hum is an affirmation, a conduit to
yenner velt
, that other world. The fissures are opening. Zofia is stirring on her bunk. She hears the hum of tanks moving by. She shifts her head and glimpses the tanks through the barracks door. Their cannons probe like snail's tendrils. They seem to possess intelligence. Perhaps they can smell the stench.

15 April 1945. She will always cleave to the date. She hears a wild commotion outside. She looks down at her body and, with one supreme effort, she lifts herself from the bunk. She steps from the wooden barracks into the camp grounds.

Zofia sees it all with the same lucidity as she sees the kookaburra upon the oven door. She sees the piles of corpses as clearly as the fissures in the linoleum and kitchen walls. Inmates are cheering, or staring with uncomprehending eyes. Some are crawling like beasts, others are collapsing and dying of joy. A woman tends to her dead infant as if she were still alive. Some are kissing the hands and feet of British soldiers who venture from their tanks.

The hours become days, and the traffic moves freely through wide-open gates. There are jeeps, tanks, trucks, and armoured cars crewed by well-fed men called liberators. She is amazed at their lightness and health, their agility and speed. She is startled by their robust bodies, their zest for life amid so much filth. They dispense manna like khaki angels: oatmeal, milk powder, sugar, tinned meat. They ladle milk from cauldrons and supply carts with water tanks. They place hoses with outlet points throughout the camp grounds.

Zofia rushes for the water tanks. She drinks and scours her body, her clothes. She rubs the water over her face with vigorous movements, but no matter how hard she tries, she cannot remove the stain. Her hair is one inch long, and she rubs water into each strand. She watches lorries loaded with corpses that will be shovelled by their former tormentors into mass graves. The bodies are blue and bloated, the piles a tangle of torsos and limbs. The air is thick with the odour of death. All around her is squalor and dirt. She bathes and scrubs, but still does not feel cleansed.

She runs with a group of women towards the SS stores. It is more of a stumble than a run. They prise open the doors. They grab boots and lipstick, tend to their faces and feet. They seek to fill in the hollows with powders, to restore depth to their collapsed cheeks. They pause to look at each other, and laugh. Their laughter is a howling.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums.

His voice is benign, his ‘yes' absent-minded. His hair is static, shaped by many winds into a taut mould. But his face is tranquil. Reassuring. The stores of memory are being looted. Zofia is back in the time before.

‘Only Zalmanowicz understood,' she says. Again she is startled at the sound of her voice. ‘Only Zalmanowicz knew who I really was.' She speaks to Bloomfield's indirect gaze, to its neutrality tempered by a childish smile.

‘Zalmanowicz said I was a clever girl. He said, something would become of me. He was my teacher in the Yiddish folk school, yet he came to our apartment in Kazimierz. He told my mother that I should not leave school. But I had to work and that was that.'

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums.

It is all he allows himself to say. His inner demons remain caged, but hers are breaking loose. He longs for the streets, Zofia, for interiors and darkened rooms; but apart from this they are the same, their faces carved with a parallel wariness, their spirits tainted by an indelible stain.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums.

And the doors are opening onto the camp grounds. Zofia sees herself among other women, naked. They are washing their dresses and underclothes with water trickling from broken pipes. She squeezes the garments dry, and starts washing them again. From the barracks she hears a disembodied coughing, an involuntary shitting, bursts of laughter, the final gasps of an inmate's breath. She cannot tell the living from the dead. She cannot discern laughter from weeping, she cannot distinguish grins from death.

She returns to the trickling water and glances at her shrunken breasts. She senses that as soon as she stops scouring, she too will become a corpse. She scrubs her face, her arms, her wasted thighs, her bony feet. She squeezes the garments and starts washing them again. She must remove every stain. She is terrified of her nakedness. She must scrub and scour, she must be cleansed and dressed.