Scraps of Heaven Page 20

  ‘What did you see?’ the journalist barks.

  ‘The Holden was goin’ fast, along Rich’son Street,’ says one of the boys.

  ‘There was five in the car. It was swervin’ across the road,’ says another.

  ‘They were probably drunk,’ cuts in an older boy.

  ‘No, the Ford was goin’ along Richardson…’

  ‘Nah, the Holden was the one goin’ along Rich’son…’

  ‘No, it was Cannin’ Street. Look at the way it’s facin’ you drongo…’

  ‘Nah, the Holden back-flipped you...’

  ‘One at a time,’ says the reporter.

  ‘Shouldn’t let kids so young drive,’ butts in an adult.

  ‘Bloody idiots,’ snaps another.

  Josh’s fever has gone. He sees the garish greens of the lawn, the curdled red of drying blood. He listens to the raised voices of the towtruck drivers, the alarm of an ambulance pulling away from the kerb. He gazes at the blanket that covers the woman’s face. She seems alone, and neglected. Everything appears new. And exposed. He has re-entered the world of the living, and he has been greeted by death.

  The winter solstice is barely over, yet the new season’s budding has begun. The poplar buds are clustered at the ends of green twigs. Like defiant stragglers, the remains of last year’s leaves hold on. They extend like arthritic fingers from the ends of older twigs. Bloomfield glances at the leaves as he walks by. ‘The soul resides in the feet,’ he mutters. ‘The sages are wrong to think that it resides in the skies.’

  He settles on the Canning Street bench by the edge of Curtain Square. Bloomfield can make out two sounds, ‘Oompah, oompah’, in the distance, intertwined. One is a baritone, the other, a faint whine.

  A couple step out of a nearby lane. One is a large man, pot-bellied and stout. His instrument too is large. It curls like steel intestines round his shoulders and neck. A giant funnel projects a low-toned fart. His partner is short and lopes beside him. She wears a cardigan over a cotton dress, even though it is cold, and clasps a trumpet in her right hand. A procession of children grows larger as the two circle the square. They keep marching and playing, intent on their task. ‘What sort of thing is that?’ asks one child. The fat man stops. ‘A sousaphone,’ he replies.

  The couple resume their synchronised strides. They march back over Canning Street and disappear into the lane from which they had stepped out. The trumpet notes fade long before those of the sousaphone. Its growl hangs in the air like a puff of car exhaust.

  Bloomfield retains the image long after the couple have left. He huddles deep in his overcoat. ‘Yes,’ he hums. ‘Yes. Yes.’

  He remains seated as the day draws to a close. Even though the solstice is over, migratory birds are still taking flight. They swerve in a V-formation, one bird in the lead. The others follow in a billowing fan. The shape of the flock changes from a solid mass into curving tails. Bloomfield is absorbed by the transformations. Each bird is separate yet an integral part of a giant membrane, each bird an individual, yet unified into a flock.

  And, as if for the first time, Bloomfield observes that the sky is low. The houses beyond the square are two storeys high at most. The space above them is vast, the horizon within reach. Perhaps all he need do is reach out to touch it, and join the birds in their effortless flight.

  The frost settles upon Bloomfield’s hands and cheeks. He listens to the shrieks of children at play, the rustle of a dying poplar leaf. He hears the echo of footfalls upon the asphalt, the whirr of a bicycle wheeling past. He remains seated long after the birds have vanished, and wanders back to his room hours later. And laughs his childlike laugh.

  November 1958

  Spring

  Hag Ha’susim, they call it, the Holy Day of the Horses.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ says Zlaterinski. ‘A country on God’s earth that stops for a horse race?’

  ‘Better a horse race than a pogrom,’ says Potashinski.

  ‘Why always bring it back to a pogrom?’ snaps Zlaterinski.

  ‘At least it gives us a day of rest,’ says Kalman.

  ‘So, God created the world in six days,’ laughs Posner, ‘and on the seventh he staged the Melbourne Cup.’

  ‘If you don’t stop talking we’ll still be here on the eighth day,’ says Weintraub.

  The holy day of the horses, 1958, and Weintraub’s new delivery truck is warming up, filling with friends, one by one. They grip the sides, and with a leg on the tyres they hoist themselves up. Fanny, the last delivery horse of Rathdowne Street, has been retired. Weintraub now stacks his goods on the back of a truck, and Fanny lives a life of leisure in the stable behind the shop.

  A day off mid-week comes as a shock. The stores are closed, the factories idle, bodies are slowing, winding down. Curtain Square is full of families picnicking in the shade. Despite the forecasts of rain, it is the hottest day in seven months, and the fair-weather regulars are back. The ginger cat has returned to the parapet, the old man to the balcony with his amber beads. Papou has resumed his stroll to the square with his grandchild. ‘Fly poulakimou, fly,’ he says as he lifts her from the pram. ‘Oppa. Oppa,’ he exclaims with each push of the swing.

  And Bloomfield sits on his favoured bench beneath the Moreton Bay figs. He looks to the highest point of the arched canopy, and observes the first movement of a fledgling breeze. The northerly winds are rising. The dirt is stirring at his feet. The canopy is moving. Each leaf flails upon its narrow stem.

  Josh lies by the upright radio as the Everly Brothers sing ‘Bird Dog’. Romek sits in the front room, bent over his Yiddish books. And Zofia plants geraniums. She transfers cuttings that have sprouted roots. She lifts them out of water-filled bottles into makeshift containers: tins, earth-filled jars, wooden crates. She leans them against the fences, places them on the windowsills, and beside the entrance to the wash-house.

  She pauses to feed the four magpies in the backyard. For the second spring the family has returned. They have descended from their nest in a neighbour’s gum. There are two offspring this year, with coats of fledgling grey. They hop on the brick paths beside their parents who peck at the meat Zofia has scattered throughout the yard. The mother feeds her young as they shriek for their fill. She gathers the meat, hops forward, and releases it with a jab of her beak into their open mouths.

  Zofia returns to the geraniums. For years they flashed into her field of vision, on the periphery, as she had gone about her work: glimpses of reds through a neighbour’s gate, a spray of crimson blazing in a back lane. And she has finally succumbed. The geranium is her adopted flower, and her mark upon the backyard.

  Weintraub guides his truck from Princes Street into Cemetery Road. He drives slowly. He is far less certain at the steering wheel than at Fanny’s reins. The back wheel brushes a kerb. The men on the tray are jolted from their crates.

  ‘I would rather be on Weintraub’s wagon,’ says Kalman as he lurches off his makeshift seat. The traffic thickens as they approach Racecourse Road. Weintraub edges the truck past blocks of factories and abattoirs. The air smells of slaughter and dust. His passengers are relieved when the racecourse comes into sight.

  They make their way from the car park through the turnstiles, and hasten over the tailored lawns like storks on ungainly feet. Crowds are swarming over the gravel walkways and lawns. The vastness of the course assails them, the sky quivers with midday light.

  ‘Blessed be the land that stops for a day for a horse race,’ chants Zlaterinski. But his companions are more taken by the women in colourful blouses and chemises, cropped jackets and brocaded skirts. A woman totters by in shoes made of cheetah fur. Her companion, not to be outdone, steps beside her in shoes of kidskin and white suede. Nearby, a lady perspires in a smoke blue jacket edged with mink; she is accompanied by a twin sister in an amber sari trimmed with gold. There is a blood red dress of chantilly lace, a yellow net veil beneath a purple hat, peacock feathers mounted on a velvet curvette.

  The mem
bers’ stand is filling up with men in striped trousers, book-ended with toppers and tails. ‘They look like penguins,’ quips Potashinski. The northerly winds expand skirts into billowing parachutes. Rose petals are flying, flowerbeds are swaying, and bookmakers’ umbrellas are wrenched from their moorings. A drunk weaves by. ‘Never ignore an omen,’ he says, as he points at the sky.

  The serious punters are studying form guides, taking notes, exchanging tips. They are weighing up the state of the track, the form of a horse, its ability to stay. They take into account the horse’s barrier position and jockey’s weight. They are devotees of a cult, veteran punters in collars, hats and ties. They pride themselves on self-devised betting systems they are convinced will finally work.

  ‘It’s a lottery, a handicap race in which anyone can win,’ says Posner, whose barbershop clients have filled him in on the subtleties of the game.

  ‘It’s a science,’ counters Zlaterinski, and he talks of bloodlines and thoroughbreds, and horses that have been bred to stay.

  ‘So, Herr Professor, now you are an expert on horses,’ says Potashinski.

  ‘It’s all luck,’ says Kalman.

  ‘Where does one find a little mazel, where does one find a bit of luck?’ sings Potashinski.

  ‘Yes, but the ordinary man always loses,’ asserts Weintraub.

  ‘The ordinary man, as far as I can see it, is having the time of his life,’ says Kalman. ‘And they know more about horses than you know about Karl Marx.’

  Romek remains in the front room, bent over his books. Zofia is in the kitchen preparing the evening meal, and Josh is lying on the carpet by the radio in anticipation of the big race. Racing announcer Bert Bryant is making his final assessment of each horse, and Sommers is on the verandah, listening in his habitual spot.

  And Mrs Boucher is back on the streets with her pack of dogs; and Big Al is sneaking by the back lanes, and the Terrier and his gang are on the prowl. And the hapless trio are out on their mid-afternoon walk—the parents flank their disabled son as he struggles to keep upright, and tireless Valerio is training in Curtain Square. He dodges imaginary defenders, and sends the ball skimming into the cyclone fence.

  And Bloomfield walks. The northerly wind is a bearer of heat. Only incessant walking can douse the flames. He turns left from Macpherson Street into a lane, mid-block. He walks past timber fences and a eucalypt in red bloom. In backyards, radios are tuned to the races. Jasmine trails from the rims of back fences, wild grasses sprout between the cobblestones.

  The lane is a three-block conduit that ends at the railway line. Bloomfield spirals out to the furthest reaches of his known world. He turns left into Holden Street, and continues on past the Aberdeen Hotel on the corner of St Georges Road. Holden Street is a dead-end that opens onto a reserve.

  Bloomfield descends a steep embankment to the rim of Merri Creek. A group of boys are fishing for yabbies; they dangle strings attached to pieces of raw meat. Beside them stands a bucket swarming with the day’s catch. Bloomfield has no wish for company and the curious stares of the boys. He scrambles away past the bluestone foundations of a railway bridge.

  A confusion of wind-whipped eddies are deflected by fallen branches and rocks. Steep embankments mould the creek into an amphitheatre of limestone cliffs. The banks are matted with stunted shrubs and reeds. Trees leap up at impossible angles on near-vertical banks. The drooping leaves of a weeping willow brush the waters like fallen idols hiding their shame.

  At water level each sound is magnified: the squawk of a crow, the shriek of a galah, the shudder of the bridge as a train passes overhead. On the far bank are charred patches of vagrants’ fires, middens of dirt and beer-bottle glass.

  Then he sees them, in the undergrowth nearby. At first they seem like one gigantic reptile. But as he gazes, transfixed, he realises they are two snakes joined, motionless, in a mating embrace. Their skins are a slippery black and yellow in the subdued light. A heron perches in the shadows by the water’s edge, a grey spectre on a slab of basalt, millions of years old.

  Bloomfield surveys the creek; he imagines the city’s waterways pulsing liquid in a network of arteries and veins. These are the enduring symptoms of an ancient land. Yet all is fluid movement and change. High, beyond the rim of the amphitheatre, Bloomfield catches sight of a back fence, a glimpse of suburbia on the edge of a subterranean world.

  The Melbourne Cup horses are being led out onto the field. The betting ring is full of punters laying last-minute bets. Weintraub and his companions have joined the crowds in the five-shilling queue. The course stewards are climbing into the boxes to train their binoculars on the finishing straight. Spectators hurry across the lawns to the rails in search of vantage points.

  When it finally begins, the race comes as a shock. The crowd is lured to whispers, an eerie hush, followed by a sudden explosion as the horses burst from the stalls. At a distance the field is a wild herd, a brute force moving as one. But when the horses race past, Weintraub and company are surprised by the buffeting and bruising, the jostling for a prime spot. They glimpse a confusion of hind legs and forelegs, of striders and stumblers, plodders and flyers. It is an equine riot.

  The horses approach the final turn in a spray of dirt and grass. The jockeys are bent low, bottoms raised from their saddles; they caress their rides, or drive them forward with whips and legs. Several horses are pummelled into the rails as they veer into the final straight, and Zlaterinski is shouting above the din of the crowd: ‘Blessed be the land that stops for a horse race!’

  ‘Six-year-old gelding Baystone wins the ninety-eighth Melbourne Cup,’ the course announcer intones. ‘Baystone is first home from Monte Carlo, with Red Pine three lengths further back. And Yeman, the favourite, has come fourth, with blood streaming from his hind legs. It’s the first time in ninety-eight cups that the number seven saddlecloth has won.’

  His commentary is drowned in a chorus of curses and cheers. Women clutch their hats, losers feed their shredded tickets to the winds, and Potashinski is dancing for joy. His horse has come first. ‘All I did,’ he says, breathless, ‘was close my eyes, jab my finger, and it landed on Baystone. Zlaterinski, for once I agree with you. Blessed be the land that stops for a horse race.’

  In the streets of Carlton it is quiet, the post-race hush, and in the house it is cool, the blinds drawn at half-mast. Josh is in the dining room at the upright radio. Elvis Presley is singing ‘King Creole’. Romek is seated at the kitchen table dressed in cotton trousers and a flannel shirt, and Zofia sits opposite, in her self-made yellow dress.

  Romek is the master of the watermelon. It is one of the few domestic tasks he is allowed to perform. He fetches the large knife, carves the watermelon into halves, quarters, and finally, neat eighths. He works with care. He does not want the knife to slip. He does not want to spoil his rare chance to successfully perform his task. Zofia takes little notice of what he is doing. She is empty of thought. She has the contented exhaustion of a waitress at the end of a night shift, and she observes the white pigeon’s comical walk, the way it juts its head. She attempts to emulate the movement, and bobs her head to and fro while trying to keep her neck still. Zofia softly laughs at her failed attempt.

  Romek observes the whiteness of her upper arms, the permanent tan on the skin above her breasts, the gradations of sun-burnished darkness that extend from her lower arms. He observes that which he no longer touches. Her body fits comfortably in her yellow dress. Her beauty is heightened, as it always has been, because she seems unaware of it. Perhaps that is what love is, he reflects, a moment of forgetfulness, a suspension of the past, with no thought for the future. A moment of respite blessed with colour: the yellow dress, the floral pattern on a fruit bowl. All is reduced to mere presence, and within that presence can be seen the textures of a lover’s skin, the uniqueness of a birthmark, and three slices of watermelon seeping pink juices upon a plate.

  In the adjoining room Josh turns off the radio, stretches his arms, and makes hi
s way to the front door. He pauses on the verandah, descends the steps and opens the creaking gate. Yes, Uncle Yossel was right. It needs to be oiled. He leaves the gate ajar as he steps out.

  The last race has been run. The winds have dropped, the heat is subsiding, and Bloomfield retraces his steps. He hears the sound of sedate conversation trickling from backyards. The pavement beneath his feet is hard. And snow-less. This, above all, is what he appreciates about his daily walks on the streets of the new world: the absence of snow.

  He returns to Curtain Square. At this time of day, and this time of year, when the trees are restored to full growth, the shadows are darker, the contrasts between shade and light sharper, pools of black against lucid greens. At this hour, despite the presence of people, the square is a still life.

  The holy day of the horses, 1958. Weintraub and company are driving back. Their wallets are empty. They have squandered a minor fortune in five-shilling bets. But they do not mind. There is something they have experienced, despite the winds, the heat, the sweltering crowds—a carelessness. Tomorrow they will reopen their shops, return to their infant businesses or to machines on the factory floor, but for now it is live for the day. Weintraub brings the truck to a halt outside his shop just as Josh makes his way by.

  As soon as he arrives in Curtain Square, Valerio sends the soccer ball skidding towards his feet. ‘Run ragazzo, run,’ he instructs. ‘Do not take your eyes off the ball. Chase it. Catch it. Hold it to your toes. Pass it back. And run.’

  The lights of houses that front the square are turning on, one by one. A crow darts overhead, a black apparition that settles upon the upper branches of a Moreton Bay. Bloomfield sits in the darkness, beneath the canopied arches, and follows each movement between the players. The moon is rising, and all that exists for Valerio and Josh is the arc of the ball, boot to boot, back and forth.

  Josh makes his way from the square on the run. A magpie swoops in front of him, then behind, marking out territory, her battleground. She returns to the lower branches of the tree, to her chirping offspring, and moments later she is back, in their defence, swooping, diving, scraping Josh’s scalp.