Scraps of Heaven (18 page)

Sommers fiddles with his pipe.

‘And the noise,' he says as if he can still hear it. ‘Shrapnel, grenades, rifle and machine-gun fire, artillery and musketry, the flare and flicker of bloody shells. Then it would stop, suddenly. Followed by an eerie silence. Then, out of the silence came the shrieks of the wounded and dying.

‘The field hospitals were full of amputees, and men whose lungs had collapsed from mustard gas. Field surgeons were experts in dismemberment. The filth ate into our wounds. Some of my mates wept because no matter how hard they tried, they couldn't keep clean. “How are your bowels?” the nurses asked. Again that bloody question. This is what war is about: crook bowels, and the smell of shit and death.'

Sommers lapses back into silence. From the lounge room next door Josh can hear the ticking of the grandfather clock. There are questions he wishes to ask. But he is in thrall to Sommers' authoritative bearing, awed by his tales. A lampshade-globe glows on the kitchen table, casting shadows that compound the silence. He can hear the tamping of tobacco as Sommers tends his pipe.

‘It's a funny thing,' Sommers says, as if awakening from his thoughts. ‘During the war, only officers smoked pipes. We just rolled our own. Now I've acquired a taste. I've betrayed my mates,' he chuckles.

‘My mates,' he says, and shakes his head, as if still trying to fathom it. ‘We will always remain close, united by a common fate. When we returned home, after the politicians pinned a few medals on our chests, we were left to go our own ways. People could no longer look us in the eye. Something about us frightened them. We had seen things that would haunt us for the rest of our lives.

‘We were united by a common fate, and our mutual knowledge of crook bowels,' Sommers laughs. ‘We were experts in shit, but we were cut off from the rest. From those who had not been there. Some of our fellows were crippled. Others found it hard to get work. We'd lost faith in words and idle talk. During the Depression years we counted for naught. We drifted about with the rest, like defeated soldiers on a drawn-out march. That's how it is. We get honoured once a year. Then it's over and we have to return to our private lives. The war buggered us up. It divided those who were there, from those who were not. Believe me, war always buggers you up.'

This is a tale of two houses, side by side, and in both there are ghosts, and the shadows of battles long fought. Zofia too dreams of corpses, and of villages alight. Josh has often been awoken by her cries. Now, as he returns from Sommers', she is embarking upon a trek. She slips out of the front bedroom, carrying blankets and sheets. She trudges via the passage, into the dining room and kitchen, past the bathroom to the back room. She has chosen to sleep at the opposite end of the house.

Hours later, Josh is woken by Shanahan singing. For the third time this week he is weaving his way home drunk. He stumbles from the footpath to the verandah, and pounds the door. ‘Open up you fuck'n bitch.'

Is it thick enough, our front door, wonders Josh? Do our neighbours hear us? Does silent Sommers, next door, know our secret? Do the Bianchis hear her shouting? Do they know that all is not well in their neighbour's house? Do they hear Zofia's chant ‘I love life. I want to live.' ‘I love life,' increasing in pitch. ‘I want to live,' held on her top note.

Josh wonders what wood the door is made of. He has heard that oak makes a strong door. There are oaks in Curtain Square and they seem solid, fully earthed. Perhaps oak doors and the brick walls that separate them from their neighbours' homes are soundproof. He has rarely heard sounds from the other side. At least, not through the walls. It is only on the streets that he hears it, in Shanahan's public displays, Shanahan drained of his philosophising as he stumbles homewards from the sly-grog shop. Shanahan pounding on the door. Cursing. ‘Open up you fuck'n bitch.' Then singing: ‘I know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She's dead, of course.'

Shanahan laughs as if at his own joke. Josh can hear the door opening, followed by silence. Shanahan's front door seems thick enough. Josh has passed by neighbourhood doors and observed their variety. Some are painted or elaborately panelled, well looked after or neglected. There are doors freshly sanded, doors blistered by relentless suns.

Shanahan re-opens the front door and slams it behind him. He carries an overnight bag in each hand. He curses the night. He curses the day he was born. He descends the steps to the gate, and prises it open with his foot. He stumbles over the footpath, rounds the truck to the driver's door, and throws in his bags.

The truck is a dragon that has been aroused from its sleep. Shanahan steers it onto the road. It grunts into second gear, firing exhaust from its backside. It lumbers by the median strip, past poplars and palms inert in the dark. Shanahan guides it into Macpherson Street, past the RSL hall. He marks off the streets: Amess. Rathdowne. Drummond and Lygon. The trams have stopped running. The cemetery is shrouded in darkness. ‘The dead centre of Melbourne,' he jokes to himself. He is surprised to hear his own voice. He makes out the black shapes of a cypress beside the cemetery fence.

The dragon is fully revved as it approaches the Carlton football ground. The stadium is dead. The houses are dead. Shanahan curves around Bowen Crescent and follows the rim of Princes Park. He looks down at his knuckles. They are drained of blood. He grasps the floor shift with a tight fist and labours into top gear.

Sydney Road is the final gauntlet, a strip of tram-tracked road flanked by factories, bluestone churches, single-fronted cottages, double-storey shops. Shanahan glances up at the Brunswick town hall clock. The steering wheel is moist in his palms. He is seeking a way forward, a way out. His breathing is easier with each succeeding mile. He has the dragon under control. He is a king, a medieval knight. He is a character in a Jack London novel. The highway is his
Call of the Wild
. The streets of Carlton are well behind him, locked within the night.

And Zofia is awakening in the back room. ‘Mama, mama,' she shouts. Josh is awoken by her cries. He can hear her moving in the kitchen. He wonders if Sommers has also awoken from his dreams. Perhaps he is shuffling about next door, on the night of the annual march. Perhaps they are twin sleepwalkers stumbling around identical kitchens in the dark.

He recalls the tales Zofia begins, but never completes. Tales of Red Cross lists, burning ulcers, and the tombs of bishops and kings. Tirades directed at Romek's former girlfriends, at phantoms, and at men with crooked eyes. Tales from ‘Over There' and ‘The Time Before', and tales that remain unspoken, stillborn. Tales that recede into defiant silences broken only by snatches of song.

She sits, now, in the kitchen and hears voices. ‘Don't speak so loud,' she says. She scans the walls; taps her forehead. ‘They are always there, always waiting. Always plotting.' She sings: ‘Where is that village, where is that street?' And she sees faces grimacing, and men with distorted eyes.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums. His face is a comfort, an apparition from that ‘other world'. And she sings, ‘I have forgotten my loved ones, I have left my only home.'

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums. And she glimpses dark energies gathering in the corners. She raises her voice to fend them off, and sings, ‘Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think.'

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums. And she sees walls crumbling, waves tumbling, and ships sinking within sight of land.

‘Yes,' Bloomfield hums, and she raises her voice in defiance, and sings:

Enjoy yourself

Enjoy yourself

It's later than you think.

July 1958
Winter

Some call him the walking windmill
.
He walks the streets with his arms waving about, yet does not care for the looks of passersby. The streets about him are a blur. They could be the thoroughfares of Warsaw or London, Paris or Prague, Durban, New York, Havana or Rio, or any one of the many cities he has walked, across the six continents, the seven oceans and a scattering of islets in between.

There are times when it seems he has walked them all, reciting his lines, grimacing, posing, breaking into a laugh, doing whatever a role calls for as he moves to and from his temporary lodgings, the house of an ardent admirer, or a sumptuous suite in a grand hotel, perhaps a single room in a godforsaken town, or a rundown inn on the borders between here and there, en route to the next performance, before moving on by horse-drawn cart or train, automobile or rust-bucket freighter creaking its way over stormy seas towards the next welcome. Who knows, perhaps this time he will be greeted with a red carpet, a
klezmer
band, and the town's dignitaries spouting grand speeches, and hordes of children pursuing the
droshke
bearing him through the streets in triumph, the townsfolk proclaiming: ‘A Yiddish actor is in town! A member of the Vilna troupe, no less! The legendary Yankev Waislitz himself, in the flesh, may he live to be one hundred and twenty and remain healthy and blessed!'

Now Waislitz walks the streets of a city where his journeys have come to an end. After all, he is getting old and there is room enough here to breathe and move about. Besides, in this city, of all places, there was a Yiddish theatre with a building that housed a modern stage, a prompter's box, ample wings for nervous actors to pace in, heavy curtains hauled by ropes, dressing rooms with full-length mirrors and enough creaky seats, arranged row upon row, to hold an audience of four hundred. Perhaps more.

It was in this city that Waislitz landed, on 26 January 1938, on the eve of war, mid-world tour, his suitcases burdened with manuscripts, his satchel bloated with notebooks, his mind teeming with schemes for future ventures, his legs unsteady after months spent upon heaving seas. And they were there to welcome him, the leading lights of the Yiddish theatre, happy to fuss over him, to haul his luggage, and drive him back in a black Buick, from the pier to a private house where he was feted and fed and given yet another temporary roof over his head.

And within weeks he was back on the stage, in the Kadimah, the two-storey building on Lygon Street, opposite the cemetery, in the heart of Carlton, built by the community with their hard-earned cash, reciting poems, monologues, excerpts from the Yiddish classics, Shylock's impassioned speech in
The Merchant of Venice
, translated extracts from the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Ibsen and Brecht. And within months he had trained a band of semi-amateurs, harnessed their talents and skills to perform the most renowned of Yiddish plays,
The Dybbuk
, in the Princess Theatre, the biggest venue in the city, in front of an audience of fifteen hundred, no less.

Yet little did Waislitz know, how could he know?, that within a year, the gates to the past would be closing and there would be no going back, and he would get stuck, in this southernmost city, in the southernmost continent, shielded by a natural moat, and his life would be forever divided between post- and pre-war, the Time After and the Time Before.

Now he makes his way on Rathdowne Street with a greeting from a friend here, a nod from an ardent fan there, which he barely registers, for he is still immersed in his scripts. He comes to a halt at the blue-and-white spiral, painted on the wall beside Posner the barber's, instead of the traditional red-and-white, since Posner is an avid Carlton Football Club supporter, a navy blue through and through.

Waislitz steps in for a haircut, a shave, and a chat with his circle of friends; and they are there, as usual, the
chalustre
, the whole gang. Posner's is a haunt for Yiddish actors and for those with time on their hands, and those desperate for a Yiddish word, and those just desperate not to be alone. Potashinski the cabaret specialist is there, and Dobke the bit-player, who once had, so she claims, sex appeal, do you remember? And Gershov the theatre props manager, hiding behind a copy of the
Jewish News
, and Podem the Kadimah caretaker-cum-librarian, they too are basking in the company of friends. And Weintraub the grocer has dropped in from his shop across the road, for a diversion, a chat, and Zlaterinski the Yiddish schoolteacher is also present, holding forth, amid the aroma of fresh lathers and shampoos, tobacco and soaps, mid-afternoon, 4 July, in the winter of 1958.

And moving among them is Posner, the master of ceremonies, the genial host. He wears an open-necked shirt, a white apron, grey slacks; his thinning hair is combed back, neat, as one would expect of a barber. He sharpens his scissors on a leather strop, as Waislitz eases himself onto the black leather seat of the porcelain chair.

‘Lean back. Make yourself comfortable,' instructs Posner, and he lays out his scissors and razors and sundry props. And over Waislitz's shoulders he places a white cloth; but before he applies the first cut, he trots to the back room, the woman's parlour, cordoned off behind blue curtains, to his record box. He rummages about and hesitates before deciding, yes, this is the appropriate song for the occasion, a recent import on the Capitol label, a performance his distinguished guests have not yet heard, a song to provoke laughter even at this early hour.

And Mickey Katz and his Kosher Jammers are singing ‘Borscht Riders in the Sky', while Posner is working with a clip, clip, clip, and his scissors are squeaking, and Zlaterinski is asserting that ‘Yiddish is the greatest language on God's earth and the proof is in its curses. Take for instance, “may an umbrella enter your stomach and open up”. Now tell me, what miseries must have afflicted us to be able to spit venom like that? Tell me, where will you find a more bitter imagination, such a potent curse?' And Posner replies mid-clip: ‘May you lose all your teeth but one tooth should remain so that you will have a toothache.”'

‘Bravo,' says Dobke, who once had, we should all remember, what is called sex appeal. Now she is cursing her fading looks with: ‘“May an entire orchestra enter your stomach and I'll be the conductor.” Well?' she concludes with a triumphant smile. ‘Who can better that?'