Scraps of Heaven (9 page)

The years go by as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.

And they veer right into Fenwick, cross Drummond, Rathdowne and Amess streets, past the horse trough outside the corner pub, barely visible in the dark. And Romek cannot help but think of his dawn plod, his flawed goods and frayed
tchemodan
; and Zofia cannot help but think of the uncut cloth, and the mountain of piecework in the back room; and Josh cannot help but think that a rare night is coming to an end. And they are turning left into Canning Street, between the median strip and the gutter, between the poplars and streetlamps. They pull up at the kerb, and alight, and approach the house which seems smaller than it has ever looked, a little
shtiebl
, a dark hole, a slate-tiled cottage squeezed tight.

And the gate is sighing open, it requires some oil; and they ascend the stone steps to the verandah; and the man of the house is turning the key, the door is opening onto the dark, and the car is tooting one last time, and Josh turns for one last wave. And the summer is almost over, yet still, they have not been saved:

Enjoy yourself
Enjoy yourself
It's later than you think.

April 1958
Autumn

He has the restlessness of a stray dog and he terrifies the local boys
.
Perhaps this is why they call him ‘the Terrier'. He is two years older than Josh, but smaller, muscular and thick-set. His clothes are matted with dirt, his face freckled, his hair a crew-cut red. He rushes about the neighbourhood, his mouth set in a grimace. He pours terror into the streets. Just to know he is about adds an edge of fear to the boys' lives. Josh tenses when he sees him approach. He keeps his distance. Averts his eyes.

‘Whaddya lookin' at ya dago,' the Terrier snarls.

Josh is on his way home from school. He quickens his steps. The Terrier pursues him. Josh heads for the back lane. The Terrier follows at a run. He catches him before he can reach his backyard, and hems him in against a timber gate. Josh registers palm fronds bristling in the distant sky, the ivy quivering on a tin fence. The Terrier is so close he can smell his breath. And behind him, he sees Zofia. She is turning into the lane. In each hand, she holds a string bag bulging with food. She is a weary forager returning home from the hunt.

She drops her bags and rushes to Josh's side. She is decisive, in charge. She slaps his tormentor in the face. The Terrier is stunned. He lets go of Josh and runs. ‘I'll getcha next time,' he snarls as he darts from the lane.

Zofia retrieves the shopping bags and resumes her slow walk. She dismisses Josh's offer of help with a shrug. She unlatches the gate, and steps into the yard at her customary pace. Her eyes are fixed on the brick path that runs between the walls. Josh squeezes past and unlocks the back door. Zofia follows him into the kitchen, unpacks the shopping and places each item in its rightful place.

Only when the unpacking is done does she break her silence. ‘Even here,' she says, ‘we have to fight. No matter how far we run, there will always be madmen who want to hunt us down. Even here, there are those who intend only harm. That is how it has always been, and that is how it will remain.'

It is Josh's tea ceremony, a ritual bathed in vapour and afternoon light. Today, it begins as it always does, after Josh's return from school. But there is a twist, a departure from the usual script, perhaps induced by the Terrier's attack.

Zofia brings the kettle to the boil. The vapour moistens the wall beside the stove. She pours the water into the teapot, places a plate of biscuits on the tablecloth, and thinks of fat samovars gleaming silver, slivers of memory that rear up. She pours the tea into a cup and delivers it to the table. The tea is strong, leavened with milk. Steam rises from the cup; beads form on Josh's forehead. It is an important aspect of the pleasure, this facial sauna. The afternoon sun touches the outside wall. The wall above the Kooka stove glistens in its reflected light.

Zofia sits by the table opposite Josh. He observes her as she works. It is happening more often now, this sense of separateness Josh had first become aware of outside Mrs Boucher's store. He watches the movements of her hands as she skins the apples she will use to make compote. She works with precision. She removes the peel in one spiral cut. Josh is impressed by her skill, her compactness. He notes the steadiness in her hand, the skin white where her thumb and forefinger grip the knife.

Zofia is coiled, like the peel that falls in one perfect piece on the tablecloth. And Josh senses the vortex within her, spiralling inwards, wound tight. At this moment she is calm, at work. Poised. The kitchen too is poised. But the madness is imminent, the labyrinth awaiting her descent.

Suddenly Zofia lifts her head. Josh has been caught out. She knows he is observing her; and he senses the power of her instincts, the mistrust in her black eyes. Those eyes are an opening where the spiralling begins, and Josh is tempted to enter, to descend into that darkness she inhabits more fully with each passing night, but again, he detects the suspicion in her eyes. And pulls back.

Zofia holds her gaze, extends it to the kitchen window, and further, to the brick wall. Its abrasive surface is offset by a pink glow. She glances back at Josh, and fears herself. Fears him. Fears his desire to know her. Fears, above all, the encroaching intimacy, and the betrayals that lie in intimacy's wake.

Josh lowers his eyes. Zofia returns to her slicing. The afternoon is fading. Somewhere out there, on the street, beyond the dining room, beyond the passage and front door, can be heard the sound of children playing. Somewhere, out back, in an adjoining yard, a neighbour is calling her child, and somewhere, within reach, there is laughter, the easy commerce of everyday. And she softens. Her eyes are now mild. She smiles, and both of them, Josh and Zofia, cling to this moment, to the ticking of the kitchen clock, to the retreating light.

Romek is turning the corner from Fenwick into Canning Street. Like a gilded apparition he walks, framed by a late afternoon sun. In his right hand he grips an elongated case. He steps onto the median strip, and wades through a puddle of leaves spread in a circle beneath the poplar tree. On his lips there is a triumphant smile. Josh meets him mid-strip. He has rarely seen him so elated with pride.

Romek places the black case on the lawn and presses his fingers on its brass clasps. The lid springs open to the touch. The violin is an auburn glow in the outdoor light. Clasped within the upper lid are two bows. They extend against the green felt like valets awaiting their master's command. Mother-of-pearl dots glint within the ebony base of the bows. Romek closes the case and hands it to Josh.

They walk together from the median strip to the house, and they touch, side to side, as they squeeze through the gate. Romek rests his hand on Josh's arm as they climb the stone steps. They have not uttered a single word, yet rarely have they felt so close.

Josh places the case on his bed, and opens the small compartment where the rosin and spare strings are kept. He tightens the bow and runs it across the rosin as he had once seen a musician do. He picks up the violin, and adjusts it under his chin. Romek watches every move. The chin rest is hard despite its well-shaped groove. Josh lifts the bow and runs it across the strings; the strings bite into his fingers, the sound is a feeble scrape that grates on the ears.

Josh returns the violin to its bed of felt. The exchange is now complete. Then they hear it, the sound of someone behind the bedroom door. Lurking. Listening. It is not the first time this has happened. And it is beginning to occur more often. She had heard their voices from the kitchen. She has been drawn by their intimacy. Surely they are talking about her. Conspiring. Entering a pact.

Zofia senses, as she stands outside the bedroom door, that they have become aware of her presence. She steals away like a guilty child. She holds her breath as she retraces her steps over the linoleum to the dining room. Josh and Romek remain silent. All three of them are held in thrall to each other. They find relief only when she is back in the kitchen. Only then does the spell break. Only then does the house resume its uneasy breath.

Bloomfield sniffs the air. It is a smell that makes him sleepy. It evokes the past with a lucid clarity. Golden autumn, the Poles called it, the time of haybales and tired farmers making their way back home. The thatch upon village cottages trapped the setting sun within its folds. On the rooftops stood
bociany
, storks, erect in their massive nests.
Bociany
is Bloomfield's most loved Polish word. And storks perched upon thatched cottages, on guard, beside their nests, remains his most loved image of the ‘time before'.

He recalls the storks now, as he circles the streets.
Bociany
standing erect, sometimes on one leg, alert as they protected their chicks, storks landing on the rim of their nests, feet extended, wings flapping back, in that moment before the end of flight. Storks silhouetted against a falling sun in a village trembling with light.

There is a hunger in Bloomfield. His half-closed eyes are scanning, flitting about. He is a drifter who moves about his territory, not prowling, for he does not possess the necessary guile. He has stripped himself back to innocence. If he deviates from this, he will be lost. He wants only to return to the time before, and the vision of a child. He longs to regain that trembling light.

The anthropologists call it animism, the psychologists, a form of madness. Bloomfield has no word for it. He is informed by instinct. If there is one word that comes close, it is survival. But Bloomfield does not merely want to survive. He craves to smell, taste, to touch and know all he sees. He yearns to return to the essence of things. It is a kind of madness, but also, his saving grace. The ancients may have called him a seer.

And this is what he sees: wind currents that arc across the skies like filaments within an electric globe. Leaf veins that throb with green blood. Fat clouds that absorb thinner clouds like silent sharks on the prowl. He glimpses that which lies at the junctions, the points of transformation: the puddles of last night's rain seeping back into the mud, a decapitated oleander bloom that floats in the gutter upside down.

He observes the hiss of vapour that erupts as the first raindrop lands upon a fermenting leaf; he walks vacant lots crusted with dirt scattering under the tread of his feet. In his eyes an ants' nest is a mountain out of which hunters burst forth, and its crater is a passage that scrolls to the belly of the earth. Bloomfield envisions the molten steel that seethes at the earth's core, radiating subterranean heat.

And there are things he does not wish to see. Or hear. Things he shies away from. Fragments of horror that lie in ambush, on the verge of yet another assault. Voices screaming,
‘Raus. Raus. Schnell! Raus!'
Out. Out. Quick! Get out! The eerie silence that resounds in a ransacked house.

Bloomfield turns from the vacant lot into a lane that cuts back to Curtain Square. The weeks have become months have become years in this unexpected sanctuary on the edge of the earth. Again the seasons are turning. The days are shrinking. The summer solstice is long past, the leaves are thinning to brittle auburns and golds. The wind sweeps them into clusters and hurls them against the cyclone wire that surrounds the park. The leaves cling like flailing chickens trapped in a meshed cage.

And Bloomfield is falling, tumbling towards the earth. He sees a man impaled on an electrified fence. The silhouettes of camp guards, guns poised, hover above him in watchtowers. There are no redeeming images of storks in majestic flight. Bloomfield battles to regain his feet. He breathes deep into his lungs and sees, finally, that clinging to the fence there are only leaves.

The sun is sinking. It arches between the streets, and leans on the roofs. It dissolves upon tin and tiles. Perhaps storks are on their way. The sun flashes between the street gaps in bursts of red, at one moment hidden and, in the next, fully revealed. Then it is gone, vanished into the earth. Bloomfield inhales the last moments of warmth, before the descent of the evening chill.

‘Yoshua. Yoshua.'

Josh is on the median strip when he hears Zofia's call. The light is fading, the day almost done. He is playing kick-to-kick football with Big Al. The football is makeshift, wads of newspaper, tightly rolled. Josh is reluctant to come in. He is hoping for a glimpse of ‘the Swedish Girl'. They are playing outside her house.

The Swedish Girl had arrived in the neighbourhood as an unexpected blessing. Her family moved in one month ago. Her hair is blonde, her complexion tanned. Her eyes are a lucid blue. She moves through the streets with a knowing grace. No one has seen such a walk in these parts. She moves with certainty. She is aware of her power, the curve of her hips and breasts, the subtle sway of her school skirt. She is fifteen years old, and in Josh's eyes she is perfect. ‘Yoshua. Yoshua.'

Zofia's call flows from the verandah, over the footpath and road. It advances beneath the streetlamps that have just come on, over the median strip, between poplars and palms, the length of the block.

‘Yoshua. Yoshua,' mimics Big Al. ‘What is it? Some kind of dago name?'

The football veers off-course. It lodges in the lower fronds of a palm alongside a three-ply boomerang, an assortment of rubber balls, a skipping rope and other objects that have gone astray over the years. The boys have not retrieved them. The lower fronds are sharply spiked, the canopy too dense. Besides, a paper football is no real loss.

‘Yoshua. Yoshua,' Zofia calls through the gathering gloom.

‘Yoshua. Yoshua,' mimics Big Al. ‘So, you're a Spag, after all.'

Josh is reluctant to respond. He is still hoping for a glimpse of the Swedish Girl. She may appear at any time. Yet there is something comforting in Zofia's call. The fact that she is there, upon the verandah, is a promising sign. Despite the violin episode, her voice is benign and firm. This evening she is a woman in charge. She had dispensed with the Terrier. She has grilled the chops, mashed the potatoes, boiled the peas, stewed the compote, laid the table and set down the condiments: chopped liver and tomato sauce. The chops are nestling in their juices, the compote is cooling in the cooking pot.