Scraps of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

casts one last glance at the shopping strip as he passes the corner bank. He walks these four blocks to the tram stop in all seasons, and many dawns: via Fenwick, from Amess to Rathdowne, across Drummond to Lygon Street. One day he intends to research the origin of these names; he suspects they are the titles of English lords, statesmen and governors, the grim masters of yesterday.
    It is a walk that verges on a plod, weighed down by the tchemodan . Romek does not mind. It slows him to a dreamer’s pace. He has not quite let go of the night. The smell of lovemaking still clings to his body. He thinks of the voyage that had finally led to these streets and his daily walk into the burgeoning light. Romek walks his confined byways and recalls the enormity of the ocean as one who had grown up in land-locked valleys: the startling glimpses of infinite blues, the first sight of billowing space. He walks from the hotel through the streets of Marseilles with Zofia, suitcase in hand. They step into the ship’s gaping hold.
    His sea journey is a reverie of new lands approaching, ports receding. He conjures images of a silver seaway called the Suez Canal, and of King Neptune on the equator, trident in hand, heralding their move to the south. The ship is cruising between low-slung cliffs through the entrance of Port Phillip Bay. He is nearing the timber customs sheds and, again he is moving, suitcase in hand, disembarking upon the splintered wharf.
    He looks down at his shoes now treading upon bitumen paths. Over a decade has gone by yet a tchemodan remains in his hands; and he cannot contain the fragments of verse that spring up, unbidden, only to vanish, as if never heard. One recurring couplet persists, two lines of Yiddish verse:
    Mir hobn vun ergetz farblondzhet,
Un mir zukhen dem veg oif tzurick.
We have lost our bearings from somewhere,
And we are searching for the path that leads back.
    Romek approaches the number sixteen tram stop on the corner of Lygon and Fenwick streets. The iron bars of the cemetery opposite shield a canopy of cypress and pine. Their needle-leaves are a sun-tinted jade. Between Fenwick and MacPherson, one hundred metres north, stands the Kadimah, the Yiddish theatre-cum-community-hall. Its arched windows, columned foyer and second-floor balcony form an oriental citadel framed by single-fronted cottages on either side.
    One cottage hosts a library of many tongues: Yiddish, Slavonic, Hebrew, English, ancient Aramaic—the dialects of a wandering tribe. Romek has trekked the narrow passage to the reading room many times. Its shelves exude the aroma of vanished days. At this hour the books and journals lie mute. They too have gained temporary sanctuary after many journeys over circuitous routes.
    Romek turns his thoughts to the cemetery. Beneath the cypress branches he sees a vista of tombstones illumined by the rising light. At night, tradition has it, shrouded corpses stir from their tombs, and make their way to midnight prayers. They are lost souls, the sages have said, condemned to drift between heaven and earth. Romek dismisses this as superstition, but he imagines the shrouded corpses bent over in silent prayer; his atheism is tempered by a love of folklore and contending interpretations of biblical texts.
    The tram glides to a halt. The passengers are inert, fatigue plays upon their eyes. They peer ghostlike through the windows, on their way to Saturday morning work. Romek steps on board, places the tchemodan beside his seat, and observes his fellow travellers. He does not know their names, but he has accompanied them on many dawn rides. He wonders how many had made love on the previous night, and how many will never make love again. He wonders how many are lost in reveries upon former homelands and journeys long past.
    Perhaps they too are lost souls, long diverted from their aspirations and hopes. We share the same fate, he reflects. We are moving on parallel tracks. We are, after all, merely