Scraps of Heaven (3 page)

You ask me my friend, how old I am now,
How to count the years that are mounting.
My life, my friend, is a long, long path,
And the distance is not worth the counting.

Zofia glances at the enamelled kookaburra perched on a twig upon the oven door. Its beak is slightly open, its laughter imminent. The meal is over, the house clean. Her work is done. As she sings the voices retreat. For every occasion Zofia has a song, and on this Sabbath eve the song is stronger than the ghosts.

In Canning Street there is a median strip lined with poplars and palms. The boys are playing cricket in the shadows cast by a streetlight. Josh hurries from Shanahan's to join the game. The palm tree acts as a stump; the players are adept at straight drives. Square cuts and hooks can break windows or shatter the reverie of those sitting nearby.

Later, those with bikes ride to the cemetery, four blocks distant, on Lygon Street. The boys chain their bikes to the iron pickets and squeeze into the grounds through a gap in the bars. Tombstones stretch from the visible foreground into the dark. The boys are playing ‘walking on air'. The object of the game is to get from one side of the cemetery to the other without touching the ground. They have no respect. They are too young for that. Besides, the night is warm, the air scented with cypress and pine. The boys leap from grave to grave. They dodge stone vases and urns, and pause at statuettes of angels and marble Christs. They retrace their steps on the tombstones to find a way that avoids the paths.

Josh comes upon a couple lying beneath a cypress. To the south, in the near distance, glows an enclave of inner-city lights. A flock of pigeons flutters up from a clearing of raw earth. They veer in a half circle of shadows, and vanish on their collective flight. Josh crouches behind a tombstone, riveted by the couple's movements in the dark. He listens to the moans of the lovers, the shriek of crickets, the hum of a tram moving past.

His friends call him, but Josh remains quiet. His eyes are fastened upon the couple's vigorous movements, his ears attuned to their sighs. He runs his fingers over the inscription on the tombstone as if deciphering a hidden code. A lone beetle ambles below him on the dirt path. The cemetery is a place for the living.

Bloomfield sits on a park bench in Curtain Square and surveys his domain. This is a true square. Not like those he has seen in other suburbs, squeezed behind back fences, bums facing outwards like an afterthought. In Curtain Square the houses face inwards, interspersed by cobblestone lanes. On one corner stands the Kent Hotel, dark now, except for one light in an upper room, and on another, the low-slung buildings of a kindergarten. There are two-storey terraces with balconies framed by iron lace, and single-fronted cottages that have known better days.

Bloomfield observes the scattering of families gathered on the lawns. The parents lie on blankets or sit cross-legged while their children run wild. They cling to swings and monkey bars, or send soccer balls scudding over the grass. Two dogs are sniffing each other under a streetlamp; a group of teenage boys wrestle, fall to the ground, and spring back up.

Every child, it seems, is moving, on scooter, foot or bike. Bloomfield glances up at the old man on the balcony. He is still sitting, fingering his beads, as he has all day. On the parapet, a ginger cat sits motionless, a statuette in the dark. Three girls nestle in the hollows of the Moreton Bay figs. They play hide-and-seek between the roots. They are small enough to disappear within them. They fit easily into the curves, and glide in and out.

An old
papou
wheels a pram past his bench. Bloomfield knows his routine. He comes at the same time, on the warmer nights, along the same path, to the same swing. He wears a white singlet, a pair of slippers, loose-fitting trousers with their cuffs rolled. He releases his grandchild, places her upon the swing: ‘
Oppa, oppa
,' he exclaims with each push. When his grandchild takes flight he rejoices. ‘Fly,
poulakimou
,' he says. ‘Fly, my little bird.'

Bloomfield enters into a private rhythm of seeing. The longer he watches, the more he disappears, until all that is left is the seeing. He is the seer and not the seen. He will be there long after the others have gone.

One by one the children fall asleep to the fanning of a breeze, the rustle of elm tree leaves. They fall asleep to the scent of summer grass and the strains of a baby's cry. The adults too are dozing off after one last slap of a card, one final sip of beer. They fall asleep on the crest of a humid wave, with relief at the imminent end of another working week.

Bloomfield is not yet ready for sleep. He does not want the movement to cease. He paces the square, but keeps the world at bay. He extends an arm as if feeling his way. He finally comes to rest back on the park bench. It is warm enough tonight not to have to return to his single room in the welfare house. Yet he wraps himself in his overcoat despite the warmth. Bloomfield senses the company around him. He will sleep well tonight. He is not alone.

On this night comes the return of desire. The skin is warm to the touch, and damp with the heat of a sultry night. Romek is surprised that she has yielded. Zofia is forty years old, and there is an enduring ripeness in her body. Yet Romek can feel the outlines of her bones, and the flesh that contains them, the delicate balance between firm and soft. He can sense the beginnings of the underlying hardness that will intensify with the passing of time. He can feel the beginnings of Zofia's ageing, the first movements towards the last phase.

These sensations intensify his desire. As too does the smell of her hair, its luxuriance, its blackness that is even blacker against the dark of the night. This is what it means to know a woman, he reflects with his incorrigible poet's mind. It is a knowledge that can only come with the sharing of the same bed for many nights, over many years. And he is seized with a sense of panic, tinged with regret. Why had they wasted so much time? Why had they withdrawn into an isolation that denied touch? Why did she prefer to undress outside, in the passage, out of sight?

Romek and Zofia make love in the dark. They can only make love in the dark. They no longer look upon each other's bodies. The dark envelops them and sharpens their sense of smell. The dark protects them, and magnifies the sounds of the night. They make love to the barking of street dogs and the far-off wail of a cat. They make love because the heat has released the scent of forgotten days. They make love because it is hot, and it is late, and they are too tired to care.

It has taken them by surprise, and taken them before they can draw back. There is an ease when he enters her that surprises them both. There is a yielding, a weary surrender to touch, a fluidity in their coupling that Romek had resigned himself to never knowing again. They have not made love for over a year; and it will be the last time they will ever make love.

It begins with the barking of one dog
.
There is anger in that bark. Yet it is also comforting. It intensifies the mystery of the night. Somewhere out there, in a backyard, a dog is barking. One bark begets other barks. The barks rise, subside, and return to the dark. And somewhere out there a cat wails, and another is snarling. His snarl begets other snarls, a crescendo that culminates in a brawl.

Josh imagines the fur flying. He knows how brutal it can be; he has seen the bloody wounds. He has seen his own cat slink warily home to avoid the tomcat's fights. She had made her way into their lives many months before. She had sauntered into the yard, a skinny scavenger, and scrounged in the rubbish bin. Zofia had fed her and taken her in. They named her simply ‘Puss'. ‘Here, puss, puss, puss,' they would call, and she would run to the kitchen door for her scraps, then retire under the Kooka stove. Now she lies in the backyard, pregnant, on a pile of curdling blankets against the wash-house wall, insulated from the territories where neighbourhood cats fight over each patch of turf.

Josh drifts back to sleep as the howls subside. An hour later the barking begins anew. Again one bark begets another and the cacophony penetrates his dreams. Josh is being chased over a field of ice. Buck is running with the dog pack. They are howling, yelping, closing in. They are leaping at Josh's heels. He slips and slides over the ice. His legs cannot take hold.

‘Run,' says Shanahan. ‘Run you skinny runt.'

He sits on his sofa, on a distant verandah, detached. The dogs are tearing at Josh. Pawing. Howling. Lunging at his throat. Their eyes are bloody with wrath. Shanahan sits back, rolling a cigarette. The faster Josh runs, the more elusive Shanahan becomes. He can still see him rolling that damn cigarette. He is slipping back. The barks are louder, more insistent. He can smell the dogs' rancid breath.

‘Run,' says the receding Shanahan. ‘Run you skinny runt.'

Zofia is dreaming of a river and a boat. She has hold of the oars. The river curves around one last corner. Rising from the mists is a palace. Zofia knows the palace well. She has climbed its stone steps, and crept through its gates. She has descended into its crypts and gazed upon the tombs of bishops and kings.

She guides the boat towards the palace landing. Just as she is about to tie the ropes, the boat is drawn back. The oars move quickly, but the outgoing current is stronger. Her arms are tiring. The river is widening. The boat is adrift on an open sea. The glare of the water scalds her. The vastness terrifies her. She steels herself against the currents until, slowly, she turns the boat around and regains sight of land.

She guides her boat back through the river mouth, and glimpses the palace on a distant hill. She nears a jetty and sees a row of hands reaching out. The palace is moving closer. She is within reach of familiar ground. She loosens her grip on the oars; but just as she is about to touch the jetty, the boat is drawn back out. Her oars are dead weights against the tide.

She resumes her rowing. She is desperate to regain the shore. With great effort she draws back through the river mouth. The jetty is so close she can touch it, but the hands are tentacles driving her out. She loses her grip. The oars snap and are carried away. A flotilla of corpses drifts by. She wants to see their faces, but the corpses dissolve. She is back in the vastness, trapped between sea and sky; and she awakens in terror, in the front room, to the barking of dogs, and the snarls of enraged cats.

The light from the streetlamp is a mild glow. It penetrates the lace curtains that hang limp against the open window. Zofia glances at the dresser, the fireplace, the chest of drawers and mantelpiece. They are familiar markers, visible in the dim light.

The barking has stopped. The cats have crept back into dark corners to nurse their wounds. She is in a quiet place, half a world removed from the sites of horror she had once known. The house is still, and despite the cracks in the wall, the stuffed rat holes and patches of damp, the foundations seem strong. And despite the sense of dread that can suddenly assail her, Zofia drifts back into a dreamless sleep.

Romek does not wish to sleep. He wants to bask in the after-scent of their lovemaking. He wishes to revel in their unexpected intimacy, and to reflect upon what they once had. Besides, he cannot sleep. His mind is teeming with memories, images, coalescing, breaking apart.

‘Zofia. Zofia.' It is a long time since he has been moved to repeat her name. ‘Zofia. Zofia,' he whispers. He recalls the first months, their first encounters. He allows the images to unfold. He is not prepared to relinquish them and surrender to sleep. ‘Zofia. Zofia,' he repeats. Her name is an incantation, an echo from an irretrievable past.

He fixes upon the early months after the ‘liberation'. What a strange word to describe the sensation he had felt when the British tanks had moved in. He was twenty-seven years old, but had fallen upon the food like a famished child released in a sweet shop. He had viewed his former captors being forced to load the dead, and ferry them to their graves. He had watched them, detached. The desire for revenge required an energy he did not possess.

In time, the numbness subsided. He looked about him and felt bereft. His ordeal had robbed him of his youth. He moved with a twin sensation of weightlessness and loss. It was in those early weeks that he first saw Zofia. He glimpsed her among the thousands of emaciated survivors who wandered about. She moved with a sense of purpose. She walked with firm steps. And she walked alone. She was cloaked in her solitude. He recognised her inherent beauty. He observed the first intimations that her body was regaining its glow.

Their romance began in long walks, quiet talk. They did not dwell upon their separate fates. They had lost entire families, they had harrowing tales to tell; but it was the silence, the call of a single bird, the sound of earth crunching beneath their feet, and the hum of daily life that drew them close.

Romek recalls the first caresses. The first time he had dared stroke her hair. Six years of
gehennim
had robbed them of their certainty. It was Romek's consideration that had won her. But what she saw as consideration was, in fact, his hesitation. He was afraid to breach her solitude. In a world where terror had ruled for so long, the desire for sex had been undermined.

There were others who did not hesitate, young men driven by a hunger to regain a woman's warmth. And there were women who made love with an abandon they would never have known had it not been for their years of terror. These were the unspoken undercurrents running through the Displaced Persons' camp. It was a time of tentative steps, returns of desire, flaring passions, followed by retreats, a drawing back.

The first time Romek and Zofia made love, they had retreated to the dark. She would not allow herself to be seen naked. The darkness allowed her to let go. It nurtured her senses and massaged them back to life. Yet even then, Romek knew she was a woman of extremes. She did not possess cunning, nor guile. It was a quality that drew him to her, but even then, he sensed, she could withdraw if she felt the slightest breach in trust.