Scraps of Heaven (19 page)

‘That is not a problem,' retorts Potashinski, who is never at a loss for a word, a proverb, a song, and certainly not for a curse. ‘This is a good one, the best one, a curse for your worst enemies. “May your feet be made of wood, and your stomach contain water, and your head be made of glass, so that when your feet catch fire, your stomach will boil, and your head will explode!”'

‘Enough,' says Posner. ‘One more curse and I'll make a mistake.' And he stops, mid-clip, returns to the back room, replaces the record, and Mickey Katz and his Kosher Jammers are now singing ‘The Cry of the Wild Chook'.

And half a block north, two blocks east, Zofia is setting out
.
She clutches a pair of string bags as she turns from the back lane into Fenwick Street, yet no matter how hard she tries to keep them at bay, within minutes the voices are beginning to stir: from behind closed doors and back gates, from the gas pipes and gutters, and the stormwater drains that convey subterranean whispers via burrows buried deep within the earth. But other voices are intruding, with a lighter tone, benign voices that rise from the pavement beside the horse trough, outside the pub:

Charlie over the water,
Charlie over the sea,
Charlie broke the teapot
And blamed it onto me….

A gaggle of girls are chanting and skipping, and two of the girls stand apart, twirling a rope, and the other four are lined up on the footpath, as each, in turn, runs to the rope, steps in, skips, and steps out, in time to the chant. Zofia catches the eyes of one of the girls turning the rope. The girl is elated, her eyes are radiant with the promise of youth and long life. They possess a primitive power, those emerald eyes. They bring the world back into focus, they return the day to the present. They wipe out all thoughts of the past, wild speculations about the future, and they draw Zofia out. She observes the girls' expertise as they dart in and out. Their hair bobs up and down as they jump, yet remains untouched by the rope, twirling ever faster to the beat of voices chanting ever quicker, ‘Charlie over the water, Charlie over the sea, Charlie broke the teapot and…'

Zofia is crossing the street to the police station with the neon sign and three houses on, two women are locked in conversation. One stands in the front garden. Her hand rests upon the cast-iron fence while the other stands on the pavement. They have taken a break from their morning tasks. They are immersed in their talk, two village women gossiping about this and that. Zofia approaches the corner of Fenwick and Rathdowne streets, where Doukakaris the white-haired keeper of the milk bar, an emigre from the isle of Lesbos, sweeps the footpath, and he waves as she walks by. And, despite herself, she waves back. After all, the shopkeepers are
folks-menschen
, men of the people, men she can trust, like Patterson the newsagent who is lugging the afternoon papers into his store; and Kalman the baker, who now greets her with a
‘vi geit es'
, how's it going, and a ‘
goot Shabbes
', several hours in advance, as she steps through his doors.

His shelves are laden with
khallahs
, bloated loaves, crusty bagels and poppy-seed rolls. Kalman is a
Chelmer khokhem
, a ‘wise man of Chelm', born and raised in the legendary city of fools; and as a bonus he passes on a Chelmer anecdote, a sliver of wisdom cloaked in a foolish joke. ‘Mrs Swerdlow, I have for you the Chelmer version of Einstein's theory of relativity,' he says. ‘Moshe and Zelda are sitting in their cottage, mid-winter. Those winters were far more severe than they are here, do you remember? And do you remember how the snow blanketed our windows, froze our rivers, and our bottoms, and even the sweat on our brows? So it stands to reason that Zelda is saying, “Moshe, Moshe, put down the window. It's cold outside.” And Moshe, our Chelmer Einstein is replying, “Zelda. Zelda, and if I put down the window, will it become warm outside?”'

And Zofia is stepping out into the winter cold, one string bag now filled with khallahs and sliced loaves; and she continues her walk beneath the tin-roof verandahs, past Posner's parlour where Mickey Katz is singing ‘I'm meshuggah for my sugar', while Zlaterinski can be heard asserting that Sholem Aleikhem's very first book, written when he was a little
mamzer
, a mere teenager, was a lexicon of his stepmother's curses, arranged in alphabetical order, secretly, for he feared her wrath. So he had assembled it at night, and had rewritten it several times, polished it like a seasoned author until his father, suspicious of his rascal's unusual industry, had crept up behind him and confiscated the manuscript titled:
A Stepmother's Invective.
But, miracle of miracles, instead of being thrashed and caned, his stepmother had laughed to the point of tears as she read the curses that the ‘pipsqueak' had compiled.

And Posner looks up and catches sight of Zofia as she crosses Rathdowne Street to the grocer's, where Mrs Weintraub is standing behind the counter amid the smell of salted sardines, pickled onions, freshly sliced salami and barrels of herring soaked in brine. There are enough aromas to make the most resistant of appetites blossom, and the tightest of purses open, and the air is more bracing, the wind more biting, and her second string bag is almost full when Zofia steps out.

She walks on past Gibson's bicycle repairs; he is a man with
beize oign
, angry eyes, but she does not mind. She intuits what others do not, that despite his ill temper he is not a man who betrays or lies. She slows to a stroll opposite Curtain Square and sees Mrs Shanahan approaching, wheeling a pram bearing her newborn child. Her face is pale, her eyes vacant, and she does not register Zofia's smile. So Zofia continues on by the two-storey terraces, the library, over Newry Street, past the espresso bar, where Valerio and his friends are gathered on the footpath in stylish jackets, fashionable shirts, conversing in foreign tongues, or just standing, hands in pockets, eyes roaming, stamping their feet to stave off the cold.

And inside Dean Martin sings ‘Memories are made of this'— the jukebox can be heard from the street. And Zofia is alert to the glances of the men, their masculine vigour, the smell of their cologne, and her mistrust is returning, as too are the voices, and she hurries on to Mick Tallon's.

When she enters, Tallon looks up from his work with a quizzical smile, and a quick, ‘Hello, Mrs Swerdlow.' And Zofia is becalmed, by the quiet drone of the machines that cut and sand and shape and polish the newly tacked soles. She is soothed by the rhythm of work, by Tallon's deliberate movements, and the occasional lift of his eyebrows to greet an acquaintance walking by. He seems to sense when someone is passing. He is a
fakhman
, and she too is a
fakhman
, a sewer of garments, a dress designer, a person with a trade.

They are kindred spirits, Zofia and Tallon. She recognises it in his fast-moving hands, his black leather apron, the pencil tucked over his ear, his steadfast gaze. He had learnt the trade apprenticed to a cobbler, in a village somewhere in the heel of a land shaped like a shoe, as she had learnt hers,
dorten, dorten, iber yamen
, ‘over there, over many seas', in a seamstress workshop in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow.

She knows Tallon's story well, as do all the regular customers who have made their way here over the years to the shoe repairer's on Rathdowne Street. It is a tale he loves to tell, in episodic bursts, signalled by a signature lift in the brows and his pensive smile and a familiar opening line. ‘I was the black sheep of the family, the youngest child. I could not wait to leave the village. Delianuova, it was called. In Reggio Calabria. You can look it up on the map. I arrived in Melbourne in 1923. I was just a boy of seventeen, and I was excited. It was an adventure. I was free to do as I pleased.' He lowers his eyes back to his work, the machine resumes its drone, and he is back at the helm, but the story, once begun, must be told.

‘At first I worked as a farm labourer, but I soon found my way back to shoes. How could I live without the smell of leather? It is the sweetest of smells, and since I was young and healthy and free, and the black sheep of the family, I opened my own business on Rathdowne Street. Then I met my future wife at a dance in Carlton, in the Exhibition Buildings, such a wonderful setting for a romance, and we had four children, two sons, two daughters, my life was blessed. And this is where I have stayed put for almost a quarter of a century, and here I will stay until they carry me out.' And his brows drop and he rummages about in search of Zofia's shoes.

There is method in this chaos of shoes piled on floor-to-ceiling shelves, and as he retrieves them he looks up and greets a passing friend in sign language. ‘He cannot hear,' he informs Zofia. ‘I learnt sign language so I could speak to him. What is the use of knowing someone if you cannot converse?'

He gives Zofia's shoes a quick polish and hands them to her with a final lift of the brows, and, hauling her bags, ignoring their weight, she hastens back past the espresso bar, across Rathdowne Street, past the square where Bloomfield has resumed his seat on the park bench. She nods to him as she walks by, and he almost nods back. She hesitates, then quickens her steps over Curtain Street, past the Kent Hotel and Chris, the Cypriot greengrocer with the black moustache. She pauses by Basso the tailors', where she discerns the outline of the tailor's dummy through the thin fabric of the shopfront curtain, and catches the drone of sewing machines through the half-open doors.

Giacomo and Gina—he the cutter, she the finisher—are a formidable team. Zofia admires their industry, the apparent harmony between husband and wife. After all, tailor's dummies, measuring tapes and spools of thread are her concern. She conjures colour schemes, bolts of fabric, novel patterns, frock designs. She longs to run her hand over silks and satins, pure wools and brocades. She is back in Goldman's workshop, Kazimierz, 1935, learning the seamstress's trade. She conjures stylish blouses, à la mode dresses, and looks up to see that she has returned, full circle, past O'Rourke's hardware, and Stellios the fishmonger's, to Posner's where Mickey Katz and his Kosher Jammers are singing ‘Don't Let the Schmaltz Get in Your Eyes', and where the talk has turned to an earnest discussion about the many Yiddish words for imbecile.

‘Only a nation of wanderers can have so many expressions for loser,' says Zlaterinski. ‘Each one with a precise nuance, a subtle difference in meaning.' He sets the ball rolling with
schlemiel
and
schlimazel, shmugegge
and
schlump.
And Potashinski chimes in with
pisher, paskudnik
,
nudnik
and
no-goodnik
. But Zlaterinski is disputing the inclusion of
nudnik
because it derives, he claims, from a Russian word meaning to bore. And Potashinski is saying, ‘Better a
nudnik
than a
phudnik
—a
nudnik
with a doctorate.' And Gershov contributes
schmendrik
and
schlepper
, who is someone who drags his heels so often he would need to own an entire shoe shop to fulfil his needs. Dobke comes up with
schnorrer
and
yold
, while Zlaterinski, not to be outdone, asserts the first prize surely belongs to the word
nebekh
.

‘There can be no dispute,' he insists, ‘A
nebekh
is a complete nonentity, a fool of the highest order. When a
nebekh
leaves a room,' he adds, to drive home his point, ‘it is as if someone has entered.'

‘No,' retorts Potashinski. ‘You've got it wrong. When a
nebekh
enters the room, it is as if someone has left.'

‘But perhaps,' suggests the philosophical Waislitz, who is now clean-shaven, freshly shorn, ‘perhaps a
nebekh
is a
lammed vovnik,
one of the thirty-six hidden saints that, legend has it, uphold justice in the world. After all, a
nebekh
does no one any harm.'

Their voices wane as Zofia moves beyond this gathering of
nudniks
, back past Kalman's bakery, where the orthodox women are delivering their Sabbath stews so that they can simmer overnight in spacious ovens, and spare them the need, as the scriptures command, to cook on their day of rest. And at the corner milk bar, Doukakaris steps out to wave as he had waved one hour earlier, and in Fenwick Street the two women continue to gossip, but the woman on the pavement has moved back, several paces, and her weight rests on the back foot, as if she has been leaving for a while now, but cannot quite tear herself away.

Zofia jaywalks across Fenwick Street to the horse trough outside the Union Hotel, where the girls are still playing. Two of them stand face to face, hands clasped; their arms form a bridge that lifts up and down, in a chopping movement, while the others file beneath it, chanting:

Oranges and lemons
The bells of St Clements
You owe me a penny
When will you pay me?
Today or tomorrow?
Chip chop the last man's head
head, head, head OFF!

She can still hear their voices as she turns into the back lane. The chant fades as she approaches the gate: ‘Chip chop the last man's head, head, head, head, head…' and those accursed voices return in their stead. They seep through the brick walls, the back gates, and the cracks in the timber fence upon which she leans for momentary support, and she unlatches her gate, and hastens over the brick path to the circular drain. Her haven is in sight. She lowers her bags, fits the key in the back door, and enters the kitchen where she unpacks her goods.

She rests awhile by the kitchen table, hunched within herself, then moves along her well-worn routes: from the refrigerator to the table with lamb chops for the evening meal; from the dresser back to the table with knives and chopping boards; from the sink, cooking pot in hand, to the Kooka stove. A spider hurries across the wall, a cockroach scrambles over the floor, the dust settles, and the stillness returns, broken by the sound of the white pigeon tapping at the window, demanding his meal.