The waiter seemed surprised. “But of course, we always love our Mother Church. Every Pole does.”
He went about his duties as if nothing could possibly be added to this observation. When he returned with the doughnut and the glass of tea, Nathan was still debating with himself whether the young man had meant that a Jew could not be a Pole. Perhaps he should have devoted more attention in his speech to the issue of separation of church and state, made a reference to the case he’d just won against the evangelical Christians who’d proselytized at a public high school.
He took a bite of the doughnut, which was soft and delicious, and remembered how Ellen had teased him about that win.
“You really are the son of a flaming socialist,” she’d said.
This had peeved him. “There is a difference between the law and Pop’s ideology,” he’d said primly. That she had laughed at this had hurt his feelings.
A young couple approached the table adjacent to Nathan’s and smiled shyly at him as they sat down. He smiled back, and resolved not to allow Jewish paranoia to mar any more of his first impressions of the country. It was ludicrous to imagine the Poles had nothing better on their minds than Jews and Jew-baiting. Aside from the usual quotient of kooks, why would they put energy into disliking a people who were no longer part of their daily world? Annoyed with himself for having to articulate the self-evident, he decided the Jewish issue had been blown out of all proportion by his encounters with Załuski. The man had an agenda, that’s all, he decided.
The waiter returned. “You find Frédéric Chopin’s...” He pointed to his chest.
Nathan grinned from a sense of vindication at the young man’s friendliness. He took a last sip of his tea. “Chopin’s heart?” he guessed.
“Yes. In the church. Look on the left side, in the, how do you say?” He made a gesture with his hands as if circling something long.
“I don’t think I understand.”
“If you go, you will see,” the waiter assured him. Nathan thought it somewhat strange that the church would keep only Chopin’s heart, but he said, “Chopin is one of my favorite composers.”
The waiter nodded approvingly, as if he’d had some part in Chopin’s genius. Nathan paid his bill and, with a short wave good-bye, left the café.
At Holy Cross Church, he lingered outside, admiring the Baroque design. When he sauntered through the open front doors, it was with the confidence of having visited hundreds of churches in his life. Inside, he was moved by the statue of Jesus, which had been painstakingly arranged to produce a martyred but majestic effect. He remembered Załuski’s reference to Poland as the Christ of Nations and felt sympathetic. What a horror it must have been for the Poles during the Nazi invasion, he thought, knowing their Russian allies were sitting just outside, on the banks of the Vistula, mocking them, allowing the city to burn.
Chopin’s heart, it turned out, was contained in an urn that had been placed in one of the Church’s pillars. Nathan stood before it reverently, grateful to Chopin for études that recalled for him tender evenings spent reading and drinking tea before the fireplace with Marion, shuttling between recordings of Rubenstein and Horowitz.
A German tour guide approached the pillar and delivered a prepared speech to his elderly charges. Nathan wondered how these Germans thought about the ruin still evident in the Church and surmised they might prefer to focus instead on the long-dead Chopin. He did not meet their gazes, offended somehow by their unrepentant air.
Suddenly his ears filled again, muffling the ambient sounds of the church. From somewhere inside his head a woman’s voice said, “Gottenu,” one of his father’s favorite expressions. He turned around to see who was speaking and was struck by dizziness and an inexplicable unease at being in a church. Disturbed, he hurried out to the street, where, to his relief, his ears cleared immediately. The sky, too, had cleared. He decided to continue his tour.
Heading south down Nowy wiat, then west toward the monstrous Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science, he came upon a swarm of portable stalls displaying cassette tapes, videos, watches, and hand-painted signs offering foreign currency exchanges. He was drawn to an unmanned stall of Polish folk music recordings and decided to wait for the proprietor to return so he could buy one for Marion. Next to a box of tapes, he noticed a set of hideously ugly wooden dolls, presumably for sale.
Picking one up, he realized to his horror that they were all caricatures of Hassidic Jews, complete with bulging eyes, beaked noses, and expressions of lusty greed. One figure held a fiddle, another a prayer book, but the one that shocked him most held a scale piled high with gold in front of his big belly, and an unmistakable leer on his face.
Shaken, Nathan looked around, hoping for a benign explanation for why the dolls were on display, or why anyone would want to buy one. But when no answer immediately presented itself, he threw the Polish folk tape back on the table and took off at a brisk pace into the park that surrounded the Palace of Culture and Science.
When at last he felt composed enough to take his eyes from the pavement, he noticed a young woman in a pink cardigan about fifty paces ahead of him. She held a sleeping little girl of about four or five in her arms. Sunlight flickered through the light veil of trees. For a split second it lit up the child’s ringlets and reminded him of Ellen at that age. His heart began to beat wildly again at the thought of what sort of people they would have become if his self-assured daughter had grown up in Poland, exposed to such filth as he’d just seen, where he would have been unable to protect her.
The young mother in the pink cardigan changed paths and headed toward the other side of the Palace. Nathan turned away from the building and resumed his walk westward until he reached Emilii Plater Street. He followed it north to a small street called Twarda, which led to an almost empty, nondescript little square marked Plac Grzybowski. Set off at an angle from the street, a graceful neo-Romanesque white stone building, with tall arched windows of leaded glass, caught his eye. Above its doors, engraved in Hebrew, were the Ten Commandments, crowned by a Star of David.
He hesitated, unsure whether to investigate further. Anyone could visit a church, he reasoned. But to enter a synagogue was tantamount to a confession of faith. In a country where a Jew looks to the locals like one of those dolls he had just seen, who would visit a synagogue but a Jew? And even then, he’d have to be religious, which quickly brought Nathan to the question of who would be inside. He felt no identity with the ranks of men who wrapped themselves in blue-and-white prayer shawls, who rocked back and forth, muttering incomprehensibly. He scraped the pavement nervously with the side of his Timberland shoes, as if something distasteful were stuck there.
“The synagogue is a place where weak men run to hide,” Pop had always said. “They run to the synagogue to pray instead of fighting for a new social system, for a workers’ state.”
“What’s so great about socialism, Pop?” the thirteen-year-old Nathan had asked. “It seems to me that the system’s only as good as the people who practice it. Just like religion.” He was never sure why he got such a rise out of Pop by teasing him that socialism and religion were interchangeable. But it never failed.
“What do you know about it, Mr. Fancy American Boychik?” Pop would fight back. “You don’t know bubkes about it. You know books. You don’t know from work. I was a slave in that country. I was like a dog from the time I was eight, living in a hole, working six days a week, sixteen hours a day.”
Every few minutes the Leibers’ one-bedroom apartment under the El would vibrate with the ruthless cacophony of passing trains. From the kitchen, Nathan’s mother, Sadie, would bang her pots as a warning not to argue with his father, but he would press on, carefully tracing the cracks in the living-room’s linoleum with his fingernails as he spoke.
Nathan’s conversations with his father invariably took place in the evenings, some time after Pop awoke at six o’clock and before he went to work at eleven at Rubenstein’s Bakery around the corner. B
ack then, Pop worked six nights a week at Rubenstein’s. He didn’t get home until seven in the morning. During the day, his mother guarded his sleep. Noise from Nathan or his sister, Gertie, was not tolerated. “Your father breaks his back for you, and this is how you repay him? Take a piece of mandelbrot and go outside,” she’d say.
What little was left of his waking time, Pop spent barricaded behind his beloved newspaper, called The Forward in Yiddish, ensconced next to the window in the brown upholstered living room chair that had taken on the shape of his squat back and wide seat. Nathan learned early that he could get his father’s attention only by sending verbal darts through that newspaper. He always knew which article his father was reading because Pop talked to the paper as if it would answer him. So Nathan would throw out an English response for every comment his father made in Yiddish. Like most immigrants’ kids, he could understand Yiddish but couldn’t speak it. Eventually, in frustration, Pop would come out of his newspaper cave, growling like a bear whose sleep had been disturbed by a flea.
Yet on Yom Kippur mornings, when Nathan and his father cooked up a batch of onions so the whole neighborhood would know that Sadie Leiber’s husband and son were disgracing her and God again by not fasting, or on the evenings when Pop invited him to play gin rummy around the kitchen table with Lou Gersh from down the hall, a penny a game, and on all those Saturdays when the family went to Coney Island and Pop bought hot dogs with sauerkraut and tickets for the rides at Steeplechase, Nathan loved his father deeply and hungrily. He especially loved the ferocity of Pop’s belief in socialism and his equally ferocious hatred of all things Polish. They alone transformed the tired drone who sat like a sack of potatoes staring with his big, sad eyes out the living room window. He became passionate, alive. And when Pop came alive, he’d reach out to his son to teach him what he cared about. For Nathan, the magnetic ties between socialism, Poland, and Pop were an intricate puzzle he could never piece together and which his father would never explain.
Nathan looked at the tree shadows rustling across the white stone walls of the synagogue. Suddenly, half a dozen voices echoed the singsong of Jewish prayer off the high walls inside. He pulled out his tour book. “The Noyk Synagogue,” it said, “is the only remaining synagogue of the Warsaw Ghetto and the only functioning synagogue in Warsaw. The Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, which held up to three thousand people, was blown up by the Nazis. The Noyk was gutted for use as a horse stable during the war and reopened in 1983 after a complete restoration. It is open to tourists from ten until three o’clock on Thursdays.”
Well, that’s that, Nathan thought. It’s not Thursday.
A Pole wearing a blue cloth jacket and workman’s overalls rounded the corner of the building. After he’d gone, Nathan noticed that one of the front doors of the synagogue was slightly ajar. He climbed the steps and entered the foyer, telling himself he was only interested in the building’s historical significance.
In the large, high-walled sanctuary, graceful brass chandeliers shone in the white light that poured through the windows. Nathan was taken aback by the room’s elegant simplicity, by the beauty of the iron grille work and the delicate intricacy of the canopy over the Aron Kodesh, where the Torah was kept. For him, a synagogue was a graceless place, festooned with plaques naming big, immodest donors and lit with garish, multicolored lights. This is refined, he thought. Beautiful. He felt a bit mischievous. He’d have loved to tell Pop he’d been to synagogue in Poland. That would have sent him spinning!
A small group of men stood praying around the bimah in front of the Aron Kodesh, terms he remembered from his Bar Mitzvah. They glanced repeatedly at him. Ignoring them lest they try to include him, he brushed his hand across the leaf pattern of a bas relief along one wall and felt a sudden, small flutter of delight, like the feel of Marion’s bare shoulder as he caressed it.
One of the men, his head covered by his prayer shawl, turned around. Nathan had no choice but to return his gaze. The man’s egg-shaped face and his worker’s hands startled and touched him because he could have been Pop’s brother. He beckoned to Nathan, as if to invite him under the protective wing of his prayer shawl. Something in the man’s expression put Nathan at ease. He’s haimish, he thought, surprised that the Yiddish word came to him instead of the English word warm or cozy. The man’s face was as warm as the pastrami-on-rye sandwiches he secretly indulged in whenever he was in New York.
“We need a minyan,” Pop’s look alike said in Yiddish.
Nathan froze. How could he, a nonbeliever, join in prayers he’d never learned? Out of a desire to spare the man offense, he smiled, pretended not to understand, and hurried toward the door.
Outside, he immediately regretted that he had not spoken to the man, had not taken that small step that might have led him into an interesting and informative exchange. If pressed, Nathan also might have admitted that he wouldn’t have minded some Jewish company that day.
He walked around the other side of the building. Spray-painted on the white wall, next to a large, sloppy red Star of David were the words “Fuck the Jews.” That these three words were written in English made Nathan feel as if the defacer had taken a knife to his skin. His throat constricted. He could barely breathe. The fury painted on that wall was as incomprehensible as the Hassid dolls, or the Irish boys yelling “dirty Yid, dirty Yid” through the streets of his childhood.
Shah, shah, a female voice whispered in his ear. A kluger vaist vos er zogt, a nar zogt vos er vaist. Nathan ran his fingers over the keloid at the back of his head. The words comforted him so much he translated them under his breath. “A wise man knows what he says, a fool says what he knows.”
13
THAT NIGHT NATHAN HAD A DREAM.
In Harvard Square, the Hassid doll with the gold coins balanced on his scales danced and screamed on the roof of the Coop, limbs flying akimbo like in one of Ellen’s modern dances. The sound of a reckless, screeching violin reverberated over the square, where a crowd of Nathan’s colleagues, students, neighbors, and acquaintances had assembled. The whole lot craned distortedly to make out the Hassid’s words. Hawkers stopped hustling. Street musicians stood, mouths agape, silenced by the mad figure swaying precariously above. “Give me! Give me blintzes, Jew!” the Hassid roared, his voice finally distinct.
On the other side of the square, from the great arched window of a synagogue, Pop sat watching with hooded eyes. Still and remote, his slumped torso barely rose above the windowsill. Below him, the blue neon light of a bookshop pulsed indifferently. Remainders, it said.
Nathan crouched under the subway awning in the center of the square wearing nothing but thermal underwear, the crotch puckered from misbuttoning. Everyone was looking at him. Slowly, they raised their fingers and pointed. “He’s the Jew!” they whispered to one another. Nathan cupped his genitals protectively and looked around, anguished.
The Hassid careened toward the ledge of the Coop and held out his scales, the fringes of his blue-and-white prayer shawl wafting into clouds of smoke. He had Załuski’s mocking face.
Nathan cried out, “I have nothing to feed you! There’s nothing left.” He turned to Pop for reinforcement. But his father shrugged and looked away. The Hassid howled again for blintzes. Nathan screamed with terror as the frenzied crowd closed in on him.
Suddenly, an oddly dressed old woman with a strong, beautiful face floated down like a dandelion seed. “Little Zokof, little town. How I miss you so,” she sang, midair, to Pop in his window. He ignored her. She turned her attention to Nathan. She was coming closer when he woke up.
The next morning, a young man of about thirty, medium build, in a black leather jacket, approached Nathan as he sat over his fourth cup of coffee in the hotel café.
“Good morning, Professor Linden,” he said pleasantly, with the bare hint of a bow. “I hope I am not too early for you. I am Tadeusz Staszyc, your driver. The car is in front, if you are ready.” The young man stuck out his hand.
Nathan
shook it. “Thank you for agreeing to drive me on such short notice,” he said, thinking the boy’s dark-blond shag could have used a wash. He followed Tadeusz across the sumptuous quietude of the marble lobby, through the revolving doors that pushed them unceremoniously into the gray haze, noise, and smell of Warsaw.
Nathan regarded Tadeusz’s toy-size Peugeot and wondered whether he should sit in back like a taxi or in front.
“Please,” said Tadeusz, motioning to the backseat. “You’ll be more comfortable there.” This pleased Nathan. In the backseat he could sink freely into his thoughts without feeling the need to keep up his end of a conversation.
Once seated behind the wheel, Tadeusz draped his arm casually over the front seat. A thick black digital watch hung from his hairless, pale wrist. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.
Until that moment, Nathan had planned to visit Kraków. But without even quite knowing why, he said, “I’m doing some research on your small towns. I was told Zokof would be a good choice. Do you know it?”
“Sure, it’s between Radom and Lublin. About an hour-and-a-half drive. How long are you in Poland?”
“I’ll be leaving tomorrow night,” Nathan said, as distracted as he was amazed that the young man could drive him to Pop’s hometown, the way some people are amazed that a jet can take them to the “Holy Land.”
Tadeusz started the motor. “Two days in Poland and you want to be in Zokof?” He shrugged and edged the car into the traffic. “I could take you to Lublin, or better, Kraków. Beautiful medieval city, Kraków.”
Nathan blinked rapidly, jittery from too much coffee and sorry for it. “I’m sure I’d like to see them both sometime,” he said. They soon crossed a bridge over the Vistula to the Praga District, as Tadeusz informed him. He had to fight the dread that overwhelmed him when he saw the cement buildings, the primitive dirt footpaths, and the uncut grass. They hadn’t even left Warsaw. What was he going to find in Zokof, some backwater mired in poverty and superstition? The place wasn’t even listed in his guidebook.
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