“You want to see your roots, Leiber? I’ll show you roots. Come with me,” the old man commanded.
A farm truck rumbled past at the far end of the alley.
“Come with me,” he repeated, his voice stern, authoritative.
Nathan hesitated. “I don’t understand this. With all due respect, I don’t care to see the cemetery. Why do you insist?”
“I am Rafael Bergson, the head of the Chevra Kaddisha of Zokof. The Burial Society, you say in English. There is no other position for me. We don’t have a shul. I am the leader of a community of one.”
“You’re the last Jew in Zokof?” Nathan couldn’t believe it.
The old man nodded slowly. “Before the war, we were five thousand souls. Five thousand of us and five thousand Poles. Now it’s their town, like we were never here. Even in the cemetery.” His voice trailed off. “Ach!” he burst out, waving his hand against the still air as if to push aside an annoying pest. “Come, I will show you.”
Nathan, sensing that Rafael Bergson would not relent in this matter, bent his head in submission. “It’s far to walk,” Rafael said. “Where is your driver?”
That’s all he needed, Nathan thought, to walk up to Tadeusz and have to explain why he wanted to go to a Jewish cemetery. His teeth ground familiarly against one another, producing an ache that could not distract him from the debacle that was about to take place. “The car’s in the town square, but the driver isn’t there. I told him to get some lunch.” He was frantic.
“We’ll go first to Jerzy.”
“I thought you said you were the last Jew?”
“Yeh. Jerzy’s a Pole. A good man, a mensch. If he’s at home, he’ll take us in his car.”
Relieved beyond all reason, Nathan allowed himself to be led a block from the main square, into a cement apartment building whose ground floor and balconies were painted a faded yellow. Every balcony had a different type of railing, and each of them had been woven with a different colored material, presumably to give their owners more privacy. But instead of lending a measure of gaiety, as they might in a Latin country, Nathan thought the colors here merely added to the aura of dirt and decay that seemed the hallmark of modern Polish architecture.
A woman wearing a blue-flowered smock over her housedress hung her wash over the balcony railing on the second floor. She stared down at the two men, taking in every detail about them. But she said nothing. Didn’t even nod.
Rafael walked slowly to the end of the apartment’s dark entry corridor. A baby babbled. A television announcer’s voice boomed through a closed door. The hall was dusty, the walls a patchwork of rutted cracks. He tapped on a door at the back, softly, as if not to alarm the residents within. When no response came he slowly turned, and to Nathan’s great discomfort announced, “We’ll use your driver.”
15
TADEUSZ HAD LEFT ZOKOF’S MAIN SQUARE, BUT NATHAN’S RELIEF was short-lived. Almost everyone he and Rafael encountered stared at them with disturbing intensity. Some returned his nods, but not one of them responded to his smiles, modest as they were. He checked his watch ceremoniously, as much for the time as to publicly indicate that his presence would, by necessity, be brief. “It’s eleven thirty. I have no way to find my driver for another half hour,” he said. “We should wait for your friend to return home.”
Rafael shrugged, not with resignation, Nathan thought, but like a man who knew he had the upper hand. “It’s not such a big town. If he’s a Pole, he’s at an inn,” he said. “Come. We will find him.” The subtle lift of his brow seemed to suggest amusement at Nathan’s discomfort.
Nathan had never been less charmed by the singsong cadences of a Yiddish accent, which he had always found coarse and embarrassingly overfamiliar.
“Come,” Rafael repeated. He pointed to the far side of the square and suggested they cut across. At the war memorial in the center, wreaths of fresh flowers had been laid before the bronze soldier holding a cross.
Just off the square, Rafael stopped in front of a rough cement building. Three or four bicycles leaned against the outside wall. “In here.” He pulled Nathan by the sleeve into a filthy, undecorated room. Shouting drunken men careened into one another across the open floor, dull-eyed, faces red with the bloom of intoxication. The place stank of sweat, cigarettes, and beer.
Nathan’s fear at the sight of so many men unleashed by alcohol was magnified by what Rafael’s religious garb might provoke in them. He was as frantic and ashamed as a man being made to walk naked in public. He felt certain the men would surround him and Rafael. He saw himself on the floor, crawling to the door, the innkeeper turning his back. The disgrace of it, the indignity. His skin was on fire, as if he were being horsewhipped.
Pop! he cried inwardly. I came back. God, why? Instinctively, he retreated to the wall, terrified of impending violence.
Rafael stood a few steps inside the door, patiently waiting for Nathan to identify his driver. Despite his fear, Nathan took a look at the old man. He had to admit, there was something almost noble about the way Rafael met the gaze of every person who approached him. Since meeting Rafael, Nathan had regarded him merely as an unenlightened version of secular Jews like Pop, who had outgrown the superstitious religion of the shtetl. But Pop had never been as strong a presence as this man.
From across the room, a heavyset Pole, his features stretched across his face as if someone were pulling at his cheeks, swerved toward Nathan. “My driver’s not here,” Nathan said. He seized Rafael by the arm and rushed them both out the door before the man could accost them.
Outside, Rafael calmly turned to Nathan. “Then we try the other inn, Leiber.”
Nathan couldn’t tell if Rafael meant this as a test or a taunt. He only knew the man, a complete stranger, had seen how frenzied fear made him. “Look, I’m sure my driver will be back soon. I suggest we go to the square and wait for him,” he said quickly.
Again, Rafael shrugged. They returned to the square and waited against the car’s locked doors.
Minutes later, Tadeusz sauntered over. He barely glanced at Rafael. “Found what you were looking for?” he asked evenly.
Nathan thought to make introductions, but then remembered the old man’s paranoia. Besides, what could he say? What possible professional reason could he give for keeping company with an Orthodox Jew? Worse, how could he explain why the old man addressed him as “Leiber”?
When Rafael had first called him this, Nathan had been too embarrassed to correct him, hadn’t wanted to expose himself to scorn for having Anglicized his name. But he’d begun to feel an odd camaraderie the name conferred on him in Rafael’s eyes. Leiber, not Linden, gave him legitimacy, like a password to Pop’s world. He held on to it now, like a talisman. “Please take us to the place this man will direct you,” he said, deciding not to explain anything.
Tadeusz nodded perfunctorily, as if he and Nathan had not spoken during their ride to Zokof.
Slowly, heavily, Rafael folded himself into the left backseat of the tiny Peugeot and pulled his long coat in with him. Nathan followed. When they were both settled, Tadeusz gave Nathan a quick glance in the rearview mirror and lit a cigarette. He squinted into his outdoor rearview mirror, raced the motor, and sent the car lurching off the curb. No apology was offered.
Nathan wondered if Tadeusz was acting out of embarrassment at what he’d said, or if he was angry at Nathan for letting him go on about Jews. The young man kept working at his cigarette with quick, aggressive drags, apparently trying for an appearance of indifference about Rafael. For his part, Rafael seemed equally intent on ignoring Tadeusz.
Despite his uneasiness, Nathan saw something childish, almost comical, about two grown men refusing to look each other in the face, as if afraid of what they might say. He settled nervously into his seat. Rafael looked straight ahead, hands on his knees. They drove on in silence, punctuated only by Rafael’s terse directions in Polish. He led Tadeusz out of town, in the opposite direction from where Nathan had come. To his right, Nathan
saw a maze of vertical lines that were the trunks of young birch and pine trees. The slender trunks, lit through the lacy canopy above, struck him as somehow delicate, almost feminine, not at all like an American wilderness.
After about a quarter of a mile, they turned left onto a dirt road. On their right, a rye field swayed, open and buoyant with sun. On their left, more birch and pines. “Stop here,” Rafael said in English.
I had been afraid to come here, to see nothing changed, the stones crisscrossed in a dome over our House of the Living, our cemetery. As I feared, as I knew, God had not forgiven me. Nathan’s return had not moved a single stone.
Nathan fairly leaped from the car, only to feel embarrassed by his obvious haste to escape Tadeusz’s domain. He reached for the keloid scar at the back of his head and thought he heard the sound of horse hooves. Startled, he spun around. A peasant, seated on a horse-drawn wagon, squinted down at him from under the brim of his gray cap. Nathan stared back. Involuntarily, his hands balled up, as he found himself unable to break free of the man’s insolent stare. The peasant raised his reins. Nathan threw his arms up protectively.
“Geyyah!” the peasant yelled hoarsely. The horse jolted forward, and the wagon’s wheels grumbled with the sound of earth and rocks being crushed beneath them. The peasant never took his eyes off Nathan, who slowly lowered his arms with all the dignity he could muster.
To Nathan’s chagrin, Rafael appeared to be smirking. “He thinks you are here to make a claim on his property,” he said. “His daughter lives in Yaacov Hertzberg’s house in town. He is afraid a rich American Hertzberg will come back and make trouble. Come.” He shuffled around Tadeusz’s car, grasped Nathan’s arm, and led him slowly across the road to a narrow forest opening strewn with broken bottles. Nathan stepped carefully over the debris and was surprised to see a long, weed-choked path of large stone pavers stretching deep into the woods. He glanced around in confusion and wondered if this was the cemetery itself or the way to the cemetery. He looked back at the car. Tadeusz sat rigidly in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, as if contemplating his next move. “Wait for us here,” he called to Tadeusz. But he wondered if he would.
Uneasily, he followed Rafael down the path. A loud caw, followed by three or four others, echoed from above. He looked up at the great canopy of the tall, thin-limbed trees. Scores of twiggy, round crows’ nests hung like huge dust motes from the uppermost branches. The cawing intensified, harsh, coarse, and guttural. The birds swooped from tree to tree, their two foot wingspans setting up waves of clattery motion in the branches.
A single lamppost rose from the green underbrush, a solitary indicator that nature had once been dominated here by the will of man. The path led to a paved circle from which other stone paths unevenly radiated, like the bent spokes of an abandoned wheel. Two scrawny dogs, heads and tails hanging, loped by and disappeared into the foliage.
Rafael stopped at the central circle and observed Nathan carefully. “This is the Jewish cemetery of Zokof,” he said.
“Where are the gravestones?”
“There are no gravestones. What the Nazis didn’t destroy, the Communists took to build roads and walls. Farshtaist? Understand?”
Nathan was too shocked to reply.
“What? This surprises you, Leiber? Where have you been?”
“I had no idea it would look like this,” Nathan said. He thought of Mount Zion Cemetery, where his father was buried, a city of the dead that stretched for miles over prime Queens real estate, overlooking smokestacks and billboards with ads for Coppertone sunscreen and Dominic’s Auto Service. He hated Mount Zion, with its specific Jewish reference, its long rows of stones sticking out like so many taunting tongues.
But here, the very absence of Jewish gravestones made him realize the pettiness of his dislike for Pop’s resting place. “Tah! Tah!” the crows screamed back and forth above, denying even silence to the dead.
Rafael pointed his two twisted forefingers to the earth. “What they did here doesn’t change bubkes. This ground is sacred for eternity. Bodies of pious people are resting here! Men over there.” He pointed to the left. “Women over here.”
He fixed his gaze on a small pile of stones about thirty feet away. “Some of them rest, eh, mine Freidl?” he muttered.
Nathan held his tongue, presuming Freidl was Rafael’s deceased wife.
Rafael cleared his throat and turned abruptly back to Nathan. “The Poles say magicians are buried under the gravestones that used to be here. They say the stones were covered with ‘strange codes.’ That’s what they call the Hebrew letters.” He shook his head disdainfully. “It’s been less than fifty years, Leiber. The stones are gone, but these meshuggeners have turned us into their own fairy tale.”
“They actually believe in magic?” Nathan said.
“Ach!” Rafael responded with yet another dismissive wave of his hand. “They actually believed we put poison in their church bread, the bread they call the Host. I ask you, do we care what they eat in church? They make up these stories, Leiber, so they won’t be haunted by us, or by truth.”
“Which truth would that be?” Nathan asked, indulging in his old professorial trick of denying the objectivity of truth.
Rafael held up his hands in fists. “The truth that we used to be their neighbors.” His thumb shot out, signifying he counted this as the number one truth. “They called us by name.” He raised his forefinger. “They knew our children.” Another finger. “They bought our goods. They sold us food from their fields. They shared with us our daily life in this town. And then...out like a light, Leiber. Out like a light. They let the darkness take us all. On purpose they forgot our names. That’s the truth.” The fingers of Rafael’s hands splayed out before him, pointing their indictment to the heavens.
For several minutes the two of them stood together, silenced by a renewed round of screeching from above. The agitation of the crows was palpable now. The black birds hung from the branches, waiting.
Rafael lowered his hands and walked slowly to the pile of stones.
Nathan followed, nonplussed. He wondered how many of his ancestors were buried here. He couldn’t name even one, having long ago given up trying to get any information out of his father. Over the years, Pop’s refusal to discuss his life in Poland had simply worn Nathan down. Even as a kid, he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere if he asked about his relatives. Perhaps this was why he regarded genealogy as a hobby for people who had no serious interest in history, who reduced it to the merely personal. Genealogy was for nostalgic aristocrats like Załuski, he thought, people who hoped to bootstrap greatness to themselves through the imagined noble exploits of their forefathers.
Still, he couldn’t help wondering, what were their names, those other Leibers who came before him and Pop? He turned to Rafael, thinking he might enlist his assistance to research the Leibers’ history in Zokof. Perhaps there was something in the city records. The thought gave him the distance he needed from the oddness of his present situation. He toed the earth with the tip of his shoe and tried to calm himself, retreating from the disturbing well of anger at Pop that so often churned his gut. His father had had a secret, that much he knew. There was too much rage. Why didn’t he even have a picture of his parents, like the one Marion’s mother had of her parents, somber as can be, sitting in their silver frame on the mantel with their shoes sticking out from their stiff clothes, scuffed and black?
“You want to know about my father?” Pop would glare at him whenever the boy Nathan asked. “My father was a no-goodnik you shouldn’t know from. What’s to know from a man who doesn’t make an honest living for his family? A man who wastes his time in shul instead of putting bread on the table. Such a man, who left his family and never came back, you don’t have to know. May his name be blotted out.”
They’d reached the little pile of stones marking the grave of the woman Rafael had called Freidl. By then, Nathan was trying to reconcile Pop’s rejection of his father’s religiousn
ess with the performance he gave every Passover. “You want I should come to your Seder? What for?” Pop would demand, his English sputtering out like a candle, making way for the fiery Yiddish that took its place. “A Seder is for the lazy no-goodniks who want to tell fairy tales.”
“But, Pop, you’re the only one who can read the Hebrew,” Nathan’s sister, Gertie, would plead.
“From my childhood I know Hebrew from that stinking melamed that drove it into me from when I was three years old. But from my head, as a thinking person, I know something else.”
Every year Pop would refuse to participate in the telling of the story of exodus from slavery in Egypt, the Haggadah. But the grandchildren, Ellen and Gertie’s Laura and Josh, would clamor for him to read the Hebrew. They had a fascination, somehow, for the sound of the language. Maybe they were hungry for the religious education their parents hadn’t given them. Every year, on the pretext that he couldn’t refuse his grandchildren, Pop complied.
Like a shaman, he would begin the incantation he knew by heart. After about three or four minutes, he would lay the book back on the table and begin to cry. The family would sit transfixed, watching the tears flow down the lines of his cheeks until they dropped off his jowls into his lap. When he finished his recitation, he would pull his large white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wipe his lashless eyes dry. Then he would look at his family in silence, as if he were a foreign child among strangers.
Everyone but Nathan came to regard Pop’s tears as part of the service, as eagerly anticipated by the children as Elijah’s visit for his cup of wine. For Nathan, tears that came from a childhood his father wouldn’t discuss with him felt like rejection. So he interrupted these moments by clearing his throat and calling on the next person to read.
“Maybe he’s just sad about not believing in God anymore,” Ellen had suggested one year as the two of them turned out the lights at the end of the evening.
“He wouldn’t cry about that,” Nathan had muttered.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 11