Shah, shah, Itzik, I said, You’ll plant your soul in American soil and grow there. It will be fine. You’ll be safe. I said this maybe as much for myself as for him.
Itzik gripped the windowsill and hummed Aaron’s tune off key, as if it were the only thing he had left in the world. Over and over he hummed the tune, my tune, until he’d transformed the sweet Hassidic melody into a plodding march. His cap, pulled over his brows, hid the tears that didn’t stop until late in the day, when we reached the German border.
The German officials let him pass without questioning the papers that identified him as Leo Rudovsky. It was as if once they saw his ticket for the ship docked in Antwerp, he was no longer of any consequence to them. What did they care about a Jewish boy? they seemed to say as they returned his papers. He’d soon be gone.
When the train left the station, I got schpilkes—nervousness I couldn’t quiet. At first I thought this was because I didn’t want to go. Poland was where I belonged, with generations of my family. But I’d accepted that the Omniscient One had decided Poland wasn’t where Itzik belonged, and if this was His test of my loyalty to the child He’d given me, so be it. I made ready for the crossing.
I should have remembered that God responds to our prayers in strange and mysterious ways. When the train crossed the border, a dark whirling cloud came upon us. With deafening noise it swept me from Itzik. My vision, blurred and doubled as it was, faded until I could not see at all. I began to sink, slowly, softly. When my sight returned, there was nothing but the color blue, only blue. I felt a certain buoyancy and tried to speak, to say, Gottenu, where am I? But even my breath was bound, trapped in a liquid universe.
Master of the Universe, I protested. Is this Your judgment of me, an afterlife of exile in the waters of Your creation? Is this my punishment for breaking the chain of generations? Does it not move You that I repent? The sin of childlessness was mine, not Berel’s. I know now what I did not know in life, that the child nurtures Man as Man nurtures God. Fear made my tongue wag still harder. Almighty Creator, why did You give me a child, only to take him away before I could put something of You in him?
God did not answer me. As for Itzik, not a sound from him either. I waited desperately for his prayers, that they might redeem me. Even so, I told myself, surely a God of Justice would not have returned me to the living only to punish my sins. Surely there was a reason He had chosen me, not Ruchelle Cohen, to lead Itzik from Poland. Maybe He only meant I should believe myself condemned to eternal exile so that I would know the full sweetness of redemption when it came.
I clung to this midrash—this interpretation—like a drowning person clings to the branch. But I would be lying if I did not say I was also driven nearly mad to find myself floating in that vast blueness, helpless and insignificant as a fleck of dust. I waited, suspended between grief and wonder at the awesome power of God.
Then, without warning, a living soul came to me. It had lost its way to God’s great light. This was not Itzik, but someone from our town, one of those rare souls whose flame burns into the world beyond. My father used to tell me some souls suffer so profoundly they transcend the world, but I had not believed him until this one shone on me in the blue.
God the Joker has answered me at last, I thought. I am to guide this soul also, like Itzik, to where it needs to go. And indeed, when I touched that soul I emerged briefly from exile. What that man, that beautiful man, saw of me, I cannot say. I only know that with him, I had some peace, enough to give me hope of return to rest with my body, and some respite from the terror of my entombment in the blue.
The silence in that place was broken only once. The loud echo of a ram’s horn passed me like a comet. On its tail rode my father’s voice, clear as in life. Be vigilant and await the coming of Aaron’s sister, Miriam, he called to me. Return her timbrel and she will make an opening for you to return.
I waited. I became vigilant. I listened for the shake of a timbrel and wondered what it could mean.
Time passed. Itzik went to his final rest. I felt his uncooked soul return, exhausted, to the firmament. Master of the Universe, I prayed, let it not end here. Let me not end in this blue water.
PART II
NATHAN
In the tree’s higher branches the crows sit,
Seven across, sunlight shining off the black crowns of their heads
They recite their opinions of the dead
Tah! Tah!
Their beaks bobbing over the bones
Tah! Tah!
And with spread wings they descend to earth
To walk among us on two legs
Lingering at our feet.
9
SHORTLY AFTER HE ARRIVED AT WARSAW’S OKECIE AIRPORT IN May 1991, Professor Nathan Linden was paged repeatedly by loudspeaker. He didn’t respond. Perhaps he didn’t recognize the Polish pronunciation of his name. More likely, he didn’t listen to the broadcast. At fifty-nine, Nathan had become adept at insulating himself from inconsequential stimuli, and that afternoon he was wholly intent on finding his colleague, Professor Czesław Dombrowski, of the History Department at Warsaw University, who was supposed to meet him at the baggage claim.
Nathan circled the room several times, discreetly attempting to make eye contact with men he thought looked like Polish academics. He began to imagine how he would respond to Dombrowski’s words of welcome, and even how he would deflect Dombrowski’s apologies for not recognizing him immediately. By the fourth or fifth time around, he was becoming irritable and tense, and all but ready to concede that his wife had been right. This trip had not been worth the trouble.
Four months earlier, the invitation to Poland had arrived at Nathan’s home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He’d found the letter in the foyer mail tray and had called upstairs to his wife, Marion, with the news.
“Poland? Of all places!” had been her reaction.
The Victorian’s stairs had creaked like old bedsprings under her feet as she’d descended. He was charmed by his home’s idiosyncrasies. After thirty years, its gracious architecture still gave him a sense of accomplishment.
The winter sun had lit Marion’s salt-and-pepper hair as she’d stood on the landing. He’d smiled contentedly up at her, his bride. “They’ve asked me to lecture on constitutional paradigms,” he’d said. “It’s been a year since the Communist Party’s been dissolved. After the Round Table Agreements between the government and the opposition last year, they’ve had the apparatus of a democracy in place. But they’re still living under a Soviet-style constitution. It’s a three-day trip. What do you think?”
Marion Linden was used to her husband’s pedagogic style of speaking. She went to him in the foyer and took the letter from his hand. “What about your Prague trip in the fall?” she’d said. “Maybe it would be better to schedule them back to back.”
They’d passed through the short hallway to the kitchen. He’d seated himself at the table. She’d heated the water for tea.
“No, I can’t wait for the fall,” he’d said. “If I wait, even for a few months, the mood could swing in another direction, and they might not be welcoming an American’s opinion.”
“It’s a long way to go for just three days.”
“I know. But my suspicion is, the lecture at the university is just window dressing, an introduction. If they’re interested in what I have to say, they’ll put me in touch with the people in parliament who are drafting the new constitution. That could be pretty interesting, I think.” He’d given her the sly grin he knew she loved. “Besides, how can I turn down Dombrowski when he wrote that I was ‘Harvard’s most justifiably eminent constitutional scholar?’”
She’d laughed. “Nathan, I think you’re going to Poland.”
But now, as Nathan stood in the airport with his bags collected, no one seemed to be looking for him. “Professor Nathan Linden,” the loudspeaker announced again, and this time, he heard.
“I am so terribly sorry,” Dombrowski said on the telephone to
which Nathan was directed by an airport official. “I had hoped we could have a private talk on our way to your hotel, since that won’t be possible at the reception this evening, with all the people who will want to speak with you. Unfortunately, just a few hours ago my father became seriously ill, and I must go to him at the hospital.”
“Of course,” Nathan said, already bracing himself for the unpleasant task of getting into the city on his own.
Dombrowski was anxious. “Do you think you can find the Marriott shuttle bus, or should I try to find someone else to drive you there?”
Nathan slid his fingers under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “No, it’s quite all right. I’ll take the shuttle. I hope your father feels better soon. I’ll see you later at the reception.”
Outside, the terminal’s awning was no protection from the hard, slanting rain that had begun to fall. Nathan opened the mini travel umbrella that Marion, as always, had carefully tucked into the bottom of his carry on bag, but he quickly became uncomfortably damp.
By the time the Marriott bus pulled up and opened its doors like a pair of arms, he was no longer irritated that his request for a Polish hotel had been ignored. Much as it embarrassed him to look like a garden-variety American tourist staying at an American hotel, the Marriott was at least going to be comfortable, and comfort, he admitted to himself, was what he wanted.
He remembered, with some discomfort, a conversation he’d had with his daughter, Ellen, when he’d last visited her in Manhattan. They’d been having coffee at the café downstairs from her apartment, when a tightly massed group of Japanese had passed by. “A tourist is a silly creature—a duck out of water,” he’d commented. “If you travel with a purpose, Ellen, you’ll always have the dignity of an insider.”
She’d just smiled and made a point of shaking her long copper corkscrew curls, the way she had since she was a little girl. “There’s nothing wrong with being a stranger, Dad,” she’d said. “No one belongs everywhere. You go around the world being met at airports and taken around by academics who make you feel as if you’ve never left home. Where’s the adventure in that?”
He watched the driver load wet luggage onto the Marriott bus and thought, An adventure like this, I could do without. That was the kind of thing his pop used to say. But Pop would never have gotten on a plane to Poland. “What do I need with such a place?” he would have said, as if it was offensive to even suggest the idea of traveling. Which was why Pop had never gone anyplace.
Nathan looked out the window as the bus headed into the city. Warsaw’s architectural theme appeared to be a harsh display of Soviet bureaucratic power. The drab concrete-block buildings had been dropped, seemingly at random, onto littered, uncut grass, gracelessly traversed with unpaved footpaths. It depressed him even more to see the neon lights of McDonald’s and the massive warehouselike IKEA inflicting their new kind of insult upon the city.
Yet he was relieved when the Marriott Hotel, with its lobby brightly lit with chandeliers and done up in marble, turned out to be a replica of its high-end American counterparts, and just as comfortable. As was his custom after overseas flights, he unpacked, closed the curtains of his room, and took a long nap.
He awoke feeling much better and was getting dressed for the reception being given in his honor at the home of someone in the History Department, when the phone rang. Dombrowski again. It seemed his father was now in critical condition. He was terribly embarrassed he hadn’t been able to make further arrangements. There was a painful pause on the line; then Dombrowski said he would call someone to take Nathan to the reception.
Now, Dombrowski had been in contact with Nathan for almost five months. Nathan felt as if he already knew the man. He liked him too. “It’s quite all right. There’s no need to trouble yourself. I’ll have the concierge call a taxi,” he assured him. What else could he say? Dombrowski was clearly distraught and suffering from conflicted responsibilities. The whole thing was horribly awkward.
Downstairs, the taxi driver, summoned by the hotel, seemed to know the address Nathan handed him on a slip of paper. Even though he didn’t speak much English, he had the ramrod posture of a man who knew what he was about. It therefore came as a great surprise to Nathan when after about twenty minutes the fellow stopped in the middle of a collection of gray cereal-box buildings, arbitrarily clumped at odd angles, and left him to fend for himself. “Number eight,” the driver said, pointing vaguely at one of the buildings. And as if to clear up any doubt Nathan might have had about what he was expected to do with this information, the driver put out his hand for the fare and added, “You go.”
Half an hour after he’d stepped out of the taxi, Nathan was still wandering around, unable to get his bearings. Gray pavement, unadorned by a single tree, stretched before him like a blank canvas. He cursed the taxi driver under his breath. Then he cursed himself for paying him what he assumed must have been a small fortune.
It was six thirty. By now he was supposed to be in building number eight. They were waiting for him in apartment twenty-three. He looked up at the tiny windows of the apartment buildings around him, hoping for some direction. But all he saw was a grid of panes, many of them piled high with disarrayed possessions.
He checked his watch again, dreading the prospect of having to ask someone for help, of being forced to admit his unfamiliarity with the language and the neighborhood. It didn’t matter to Nathan that anyone could get lost in a city. He hated to appear unknowledgeable, even about things that he could not reasonably be expected to know. This, and his stubbornness about not being interfered with on such occasions, had driven Marion and his daughter, Ellen, to distraction more times than any of them could recall. But now, even if he had wanted to ask, there was no one around to give directions except a small boy on roller skates who disappeared quickly around a corner.
He began to talk to himself in a monotone hum that disguised the words, an old habit that usually calmed him. “Building number eight. Is this number eight? This is seventeen. Here is four. There’s no number on that one.” The sun was setting, but sweat gathered around his collarbones in the warm May air. Droplets had already begun a slow descent through the hair on his chest. His ascot stuck to his neck, the silk unmoored from its careful placement at the center of his white shirt under the brown tweed jacket. He reached up to remove it but stopped when he realized that without the ascot he would appear unprofessional. What would they think of him?
“Damn,” he muttered. Why had he been so nonchalant? Why hadn’t he at least insisted on more detailed instructions from Dombrowski?
He paused to look around again and to adjust his glasses, which were sliding down the thin ridge of his nose. He reached for the keloid scar under the hair at the back of his head, another nervous habit that calmed him. With several short strokes of his fingertips he also combed back some strands at the top of his head.
Four men ambled toward him from across the parking lot to his left, arms clasped around each other for support, bodies sagging from what looked to Nathan like the result of years of too much alcohol and starchy food. Their loud song sent him scurrying toward the protective shadows of a numberless building. It was an instinct brought from childhood. He had always hugged the buildings as a boy, trying to hide his small, skinny frame from the swaggering young toughs, Irish boys mostly, whose fathers had taught them to be proud of their fists. He remembered, as his jacket now scraped against the rough cement, how he’d wished for a father who’d put some manly energy into his son instead of merely spewing sarcastic remarks about life, as Pop did, from his third-story window.
The men drew closer. Nathan felt a sick wave in his gut. It whorled around his stomach and into his chest, as familiar and inevitable as the game of taunts and fists that used to follow. He put his head down and picked up his pace, aware that since his arrival in Poland, he’d felt a certain sense of threat, which he’d dismissed as irritation at not having been treated by his hosts in the usual deferential manner.
The drunks were laughing now. He thought they were pointing at him, so he refused to look at them, to give them an opening. He reached a door and pulled himself inside, dizzy with panic.
The men passed, lolling their heads from side to side like bulls. He watched them through the small window in the door until they were gone and it was silent. He stepped back, straightened his ascot, ashamed of the fear that had left half-moon sweat stains spreading in the armpits of his shirt.
The hallway, lit by dim, uncovered lightbulbs at either end, stank from rotting food, like cooked cabbage, he thought. Over a doorpost, like a miracle, he saw the number eight. “Thank God,” he said, weak with relief. He hurried up the stairs, found apartment twenty-three, and gave several short knocks. A tall man in a white knit boatneck shirt opened the door and extended his hand. On his third finger, he wore a large ring with an ornate crest.
“Welcome to my home, Professor Linden! We hope you had no difficulty finding us,” the man said.
Nathan smiled. “No. No difficulty at all.”
I heard the words, saw the two men in the doorway. Such bright lights they had inside. Thanks God, I was delivered from my blue exile! My eyesight was still no good, everything in two’s and three’s, but I could see that I was not among Jews there. They were beardless men, their clothes strangely cut. And the women—I was ashamed to look at them. Uncovered arms and skirts so short you could not imagine. Why do You send me here? I asked the Almighty.
From Him, I got no answers, but I remembered my poppa calling to me. “Be vigilant and await the coming of Aaron’s sister, Miriam. Return her timbrel, and she will make an opening for you to return,” he had said. “Why Miriam, Poppa, why a timbrel?” I called out. From him I got no answer either. But what joy, my voice was returned to me at last. I was sure these strangers would hear me, but I needn’t have feared. No one turned in my direction.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 7