Scraps of Heaven

by Arnold Zable

  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.

  ‘Yes,’ Bloomfield hums.

  His quiet presence draws her back. She fastens her eyes upon the kookaburra. She is steering back to safer territory, firmer ground.

  ‘Zalmanowicz was an oak,’ she says. ‘He walked through the streets of Kazimierz with a straight back. He believed in justice. And now he lies dead. And the corpses are piling up. They are in the dining-room cupboard. I must wash the clothes, or the world will be a balagan, a mess.

  ‘And there are dybbuks, watching. They are clever little devils. They are hiding in the cracks and pipes, they are lurking in the wires. Can you hear them? They are laughing. They are laughing at me. They are laughing at us. Can you hear them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bloomfield hums.

  And huddles deep in his overcoat.

  Bloomfield is still seated by the kitchen table when Josh returns home. It is the first time Josh has ever seen him in the house. The guest’s entire being is in harness to food. He chews the chopped liver Zofia has served him. He hunches over the table and lowers his face to meet the fork, and does all he can to hasten the journey of the food to his mouth. He returns to the cold brisket on his plate, and tears strips off with his bare hands. He munches and gulps and sips and sucks. He eats like someone who seizes the chance to eat whenever it comes.

  Zofia and Bloomfield are like old friends, silent, at ease. Josh detects the familiarity between them. There is something her
e he cannot fathom, something more powerful than ties of blood. In this moment he is an intruder.

  When he is done, Bloomfield wipes the crumbs from his chin. He shuffles to his feet, mumbles a thankyou. He bows his head, glances at Zofia, says ‘a goot Shabbes, a good week’, and is gone.

  ‘Who is Bloomfield?’ asks Josh.

  ‘A ship-brother,’ Zofia replies. ‘We sailed to Australia in the same boat.’

  ‘Why does he wander the streets?’

  ‘He does no one any harm.’

  ‘But why does he wander the streets?’

  ‘I knew many like him,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over there. In yenner velt. ’

  ‘What happened to him Over There?’

  Zofia glances at the kookaburra. His beak is raised, but mute. He is simply a picture on an oven door.

  ‘And if I tell you what happened will it bring anyone back to life?’

  And Josh knows from her tightening lips, and her grim defiance, that their brief exchange has come to an end.

  Yossel arrives several hours later and ushers them into his Customline. ‘My chariot,’ he calls it. ‘I left Krakow in a one-horse cart, and now I drive a chariot with more horsepower than we ever dreamt of. Soon cars will have wings. Such are the wonders of contemporary science.’

  The car pulls away from the northern streets. ‘Oikh mir a teikh,’ says Yossel, as is his custom when he drives Zofia, Romek and Josh, over Punt Road bridge. ‘Call this a river? It is certainly not the Wisla, eh, Zofia? That was a true river. Not like this canal they call the Yarra. Never mind.’

  The contrast between north and south is obvious, a tale of two riversides. South of the bridge the parks are more spacious, the streets tree-lined. The houses are enclosed behind trimmed hedges, high walls. ‘Birds sing louder here,’ says Yossel. He leaves the car idling and runs to the palatial gates. A circular drive curves around the front garden to a flight of steps. Yossel’s palatz is an eccentric mixture of styles. The arched porch is framed by twisted columns. The walls are rendered in stucco, the slated roofs are high-pitched.

  The front door is opened by the lady of the house. A string of pearls dangles over a finely cut dress. ‘Well? What do you think of Liebe’s lipstick?’ asks Yossel, as if commenting upon a work of art. ‘Max Factor. Magnetic pink,’ he announces. ‘The latest in colour, the latest in taste. A contemporary colour. I chose it myself.’

  The wail of a trumpet can be heard from Joel’s room upstairs. ‘Call that music?’ says Yossel. ‘It is the howling of a beast. My boy tells me Miles Davis is his God. He claims no one has played music like this in the entire history of the universe. If you ask me, such music was played millennia ago. It is jungle music. A primitive tump, tump, tump. Joel listens to it until the day grows old, and he continues to listen late into the night with his idle friends, Schneider, Aronson and Hirst. They lie on the carpet, on the bed, beside the bed, wherever their bodies fall. They remain dead to the world. Except when they want something to eat. Then they make straight for the fridge, grab fistfuls of leftover roast and, like savages, they return to their cave.’

  Yossel ushers his guests into the kitchen. He is keen to show them his new vinyl floortiles laid out in a chequered pattern of black and white. ‘Designed in a contemporary style,’ he says, rolling the r’s. After thirty years in the land, he has not rid himself of his accent.

  ‘Come, sit down on my new chairs made of contemporary wrought iron. With triple chrome and foam rubber seats.’ Contemporary is the newest English word to pepper his speech and Yossel uses it with the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy. He conducts his guests on a tour of his newly acquired ‘appliances’— an electric jug, electric pan, electric toaster.

  ‘I bought the toaster for Liebe’s birthday,’ he says. ‘It is a practical present. A contemporary present.’ He opens the kitchen dresser and retrieves a steam and dry iron. ‘Automatic,’ he announces. ‘What a world we live in. Soon we will have nothing to do but press switches and, voila, the food will be done. And a robot will serve it.’

  Josh wanders from the kitchen to Yossel’s office. His uncle is a man with a desk, and an address book that springs open to the touch. Each letter of the alphabet is accounted for. Beside it is a desk calendar attached by a silver ringbinder to a plastic stand. He flips the pages. The dates blur in quick succession. He lifts a pen from its gold-plated holder and feels the coolness of its grip. He places his hands upon the oak desk. Their imprint dissolves from the varnish milliseconds after he lifts his hands. Yossel is a man of substance. His office exudes solidity. The entire house is solid. The rooms are freshly painted, the walls fully intact. It is a house with many rooms.

  And there is the largest room, closed except on festival days. Josh peeks in. The drawn curtains are brocaded in crimsons and golds. Josh slips inside and glides over the polished floors. He examines the framed family portraits that line the walls. The sideboards are a display of cut crystal and porcelain. The drawers are brimming with cutlery. A mahogany dinner table runs two-thirds the length of the room, and a vase of chrysanthemums casts its reflection on its lacquered surface.

  Josh returns to the kitchen. Yossel is talking of exports and imports, currency exchanges, investment portfolios, foreign markets, interest rates. He refers lovingly to his ‘contemporary knitting machines’ that arrived from ‘the Continent’ last week.

  Yossel is talking to tame his restlessness, thinks Romek. After all these years there is an uncertainty, even here, in this gleaming kitchen of silvers and whites. He is a man from the ‘Time Before’. He knows nothing about gehennim. It would disturb his equilibrium. He keeps his mind firmly focused on the eternal present, on his acquisitions and mounting wealth. And why shouldn’t he?

  Romek is judicious in his thoughts. They are generous, Yossel and Liebe, each in their own way. They ferry them to and from their house over the river. Romek and Zofia had stayed in his palatz in their first two months off the boat. But they do not know us, Romek reflects. They cannot comprehend what we have endured. This is how it is.

  Zofia glances at Yossel. His eyes are magnified, his voice is harsh. The kitchen is too bright with chrome, stainless steel and chequerboard tiles. She feels daunted by its spaciousness, and she is wary of the brother who does not see her. Who speaks to the winds, who speaks to himself. Yossel’s voice is a shrill echo. She sees the spittle fly from his mouth. She sees too much. Again, the walls are dissolving, the room is ablaze with silvers and whites. Yossel is a man with crooked eyes. His voice is multiplying, becoming many voices, and the many voices a continuous drone.

  Zofia is withdrawing into herself. Romek is silent. Liebe’s lips glow a magnetic pink. Yossel continues to hold forth, and the little that is left of a once large family is breaking apart. And somewhere, upstairs behind closed doors, off the carpeted passage, a trumpet is howling like a lost wolf. And somewhere, far distant, Buck is running with the wolf pack, a wild beast in a dog-eat-dog world.

  Josh is lying on the carpet in the darkened living room, his ears tuned to the upright wireless. Since the arrival of the Swedish Girl, the lyrics of popular songs have taken on greater appeal. Words that seemed trite a few weeks ago now resonate with meaning. Buddy Holly sings ‘Maybe Baby’ and Josh imagines the Swedish Girl in each verse. It is all there in those songs, clear and simple.

  The tempo increases. The vibration of the speakers quickens. Chuck Berry sings ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. Little Richard shouts ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. Jerry Lee Lewis screams ‘Great Balls of Fire’, while in the kitchen Zofia is brooding, and in the front room, Romek is bent over his Yiddish books. And out in the streets, Bloomfield is forever circling, and the Swedish Girl is approaching home, with her graceful walk, her knowing smile.

  The flowers are dry and fragile, falling apart. They remain poised between the pages where he had placed them. ‘They are old friends,’ says Romek, ‘I picked them in 1945.’ He lifts a book from the pile on the fl
oor by the bed. ‘This is my Bible, my Torah. Written by my favourite poet, Leib Halperin. Each poem is a gem.’

  Josh is becoming impatient. He has books of his own to read and radio programs to listen to. It is Sunday night, the eve before school, the end of the weekend respite. He regrets that he has allowed himself to stray into the front room. Yet he is drawn to that world Romek is immersed in, and Zofia dreams of, and that they both once talked of, late into the night. He would hear them, from his bed, gathered around endless cups of tea, Yossel and Liebe, Romek and Zofia, in the better days, before the distance between them had yawned into a rift. They spoke of poilishe velder, Polish forests, childhood vacations in the Tatra Mountains, boating excursions on the River Wisla, and of castles and kings and cobblestoned alleys filled with angry mobs. Always, finally, angry mobs.

  ‘The flowers have lost their fragrance,’ says Romek, ‘but I can recall their scent just by looking at them.’ He is a small man, thinks Josh, as if he has only now become aware of the fact. He observes the day’s growth on Romek’s cheeks. As an infant he would run his fingers over the stubble and be intrigued by its roughness. He would watch him in the bathroom guiding his razor over his lathered face, and marvel that it could produce such smoothness. Now, before him stands a fallen idol, a man deflated. And Romek wants only to restore what once was, to reach out to the son now receding from him. It is a physical sensation, this receding. Even though Josh stands close, he is beyond his grasp.

  ‘Is it true about the ulcer on her shins?’ asks Josh.

  It is not the first time he has asked this question.

  Romek is silent.

  ‘Is it true?’ Josh repeats.

  ‘We met in hell,’ Romek replies. ‘I fell in love at first sight.’