“But my father didn’t think in terms of God,” Nathan insisted again.
“Yes, he did. He was one of us. It is in our bones to think of God as the Measure of Righteousness. Maybe Itzik would not say this, especially after he met Hillel, but that is how he thought about it.”
“Who was Hillel?” Nathan wanted to know. “Someone from Zokof?”
Rafael frowned. “Your father never told you about Hillel?”
Nathan shook his head. The only Hillel he knew was Hillel Gelbart. Gelbart was now a well-known MIT physicist, but to Nathan he would always be the gangly kid who hid out at the Leibers’ to avoid practicing the violin. Hillel Gelbart was the only one of his childhood friends who Pop joked with and listened to, a fact that Nathan somehow held against Gelbart, despite all his achievements.
Rafael clasped his hands patiently and recounted, at length, how Itzik and Hillel had met at the Warsaw train station.
“Where did you hear this?” Nathan asked.
“Freidl told me,” Rafael said, with a confident shrug. “This was the part of Itzik’s story that made her laugh. She told it to me many times. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘Itzik the Faithless One and Hillel the Socialist walking the streets of Warsaw, with me singing Aaron Birnbaum’s tune in Hillel’s ear!’” Rafael sat back in his chair and laughed. “What a group! ‘Better a Jew without a beard than a beard without a Jew.’ That is what she said about Hillel. Ha!”
The afternoon sun lit the curtain sheers until they appeared opaque. Nathan gazed at them, thinking Rafael had now lost all restraint about Freidl, as if he had secured Nathan’s confidence to the extent that he could speak of his conversations with a dead woman and expect to be believed. A slow, painful pounding began at his temples.
“She said Hillel took Itzik to find Mendel the Blacksmith, a cousin of your grandfather’s. He lived near Plac Grzybowski.”
Nathan’s heart leapt. “Plac Grzybowski, is that spelled G-R-Z-Y?”
Rafael nodded.
“I was there the other day!” he said, glad for a means to direct their attention away from Freidl. “I found a synagogue. The name begins with an N.”
“ Noyk, yeh. The last synagogue in Warsaw. By the Noyk Synagogue your father became a socialist. Hillel told him a synagogue is a place where weak men run to hide.”
“My father used to say that all the time! How did you know?”
Rafael shrugged again. “I told you. Freidl.”
Nathan knew there was no point in arguing. “What happened to Hillel, after my father left Poland?”
“Ach! Stalin’s gulags.”
“Did my father know?”
“In America? Nah! When a man went to America, it was for us like he fell off the earth. And during the war, Itzik wouldn’t know what happened here.”
Nathan noticed that Rafael suddenly looked distressed. He asked him why.
“I once had a photograph of the two of them, your father and Hillel. He was such a handsome boy, Hillel.”
“Where did you get the photograph?” Nathan asked excitedly.
“During the war.”
“You came across a picture of my father taken in Warsaw, during the war? That’s unbelievable.”
“Unbelievable? Nah. Always, my life was full of coincidences about your father and that night Jan died.” He touched his yarmulke.
“What do you mean?”
“In the beginning, it was just small things. Once, when I was a boy of nine or ten, I saw Jan’s old horse in a field. No one around. I tell you, that animal looked at me and went up on its back legs, just like on that night. Now, I think she did that. God knows how. She left me signs, put things in my path so I should remember Itzik.”
Nathan was becoming annoyed that Freidl was showing up at every turn in Pop’s story. But, not wanting to insult Rafael, he played along. “Why did she want you to remember Itzik?”
Rafael gave him a reproachful look. “Understand, I didn’t go looking for Freidl to be in my life. I heard the story about her frightening the Poles away from Itzik in the cemetery, sure. Everyone in Zokof knew it. But I didn’t believe it. I was there that night, remember. I saw him, full of his own strength. He had a chutzpah. I thought he made a commotion for the Poles, to scare them—threw a rock, made sounds. Of our cemetery, they were already afraid. It wouldn’t take much for him to do it.”
Nathan was relieved to have some of his confidence in Rafael restored.
“But you understand, Leiber? After us boys ran away—Tzvi, Chaim, and me—what I heard about him I heard from Freidl. No one else heard nothing—gornish—after he left Zokof.”
Nathan didn’t want to conjure with that statement. Instead, he considered how to delicately steer the conversation back to the photograph of Pop and Hillel. The photograph, at least, offered some kind of evidence of Pop’s history, by someone other than Freidl.
But Rafael persisted. “Think what you like about Freidl after, but listen to me. Most of my life I have felt someone with me, putting people, things, events in my way. A thing like this you don’t talk about. You live with it.”
He pulled at his vest. Nathan noticed several buttons missing on the shirt underneath, and realized how uncared-for Rafael was. It made him ashamed to try to take away his faith in Freidl, and his apparent companionship with her. He toyed resignedly with his glass of tea and hoped Rafael would not detect his disbelief.
“I’ll tell you how it was with Freidl,” Rafael said. “Until 1939, these coincidences she made happen didn’t matter so much. Then, the Nazis were at our doorsteps. I got Polish papers, which wasn’t easy, with this Jewish face of mine.” He displayed his profile with a weary playfulness.
Nathan wondered how well his own looks would have protected him if he’d lived in Europe at that time.
“The night I got the papers, I put some clothes in a bag, a few zlotys in my shoes, and I ran. I escaped to Soviet Russia, Byelorussia they called it then. The plan was, my wife, Chana, would follow with the baby.”
Once again, Nathan was stunned. “Your wife and baby? You had a family?”
“I wasn’t always an alter kocker, Leiber. I was a young man in those days. I had a family.” Rafael wiped his face with his cuff. “What did I know it would happen so quick after I left them? We had a plan to meet later. How could I take them to live in the forests? With what food? What shelter? You can’t imagine what kind of people they had running around in there too. I was hiding in haystacks in the fields, all the time moving east, away from them in Zokof.” The corners of his mouth tightened.
Nathan touched Rafael’s arm to comfort him. “I’m sorry if I upset you by asking,” he said. A painful stillness settled on the room. He squeezed the old man’s arm lightly and felt the bones.
Rafael nodded appreciatively, now restraining his emotion with obvious difficulty. “Even now, I see my daughter Sonya’s fingers pulling at my jacket. Just them, the little fingers.”
He stood up and shuffled to the wardrobe near the window. He pulled a small wrinkled piece of paper from one of its drawers and handed it to Nathan. It was a photograph of a big-cheeked baby in the arms of a dark-haired young woman. Their features were obscured by the scores of folds in the paper.
Nathan studied the photograph with all the horror of knowing he was about to hear that something terrible had happened to this mother and her child.
“Every time I thought I was finished, some coincidence came my way,” Rafael said. “One time, a Russian caught me stealing eggs. He raised his gun. I don’t know why, but I said, ‘Have pity on a father. I have a daughter, eighteen months old.’ ‘What’s her name?’ he asked me. I told him, ‘Her name is Sonya.’ He put down the gun. ‘My sister’s name is Sonya,’ he said, and he walked away.”
Nathan returned the photograph to Rafael, who put it back in the drawer. “Things like this happened to me all through the war. Two years I wandered through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, wherever the work or the trains took me. In October 1942, I came acros
s some Polish partisans in the forest. These sorts of fellows I knew. Sometimes they turned in Jews, so I hid from them. But I stayed close to catch what news I could. I heard them talking about Zokof, my town. And the news! My God! The Nazis had taken all the Jews—rounded them up from a ghetto they had made there, shot them in the streets, drove them like cattle to the trains. My Chana and my Sonya! That night I lay facedown on the forest floor like an animal, my open mouth full of dirt, not even free to howl my grief.”
With slow, careful control, he folded his hands. “For my family,” he said, “there were no coincidences. They sent my wife and my daughter to a killing place, deep in the forest. Treblinka. The ones who went in there didn’t come back.”
Nathan couldn’t bear to look at Rafael. He imagined himself, an urban intellectual, alone in a forest, hearing that his girls, his Marion and Ellen, had been taken away and murdered. But hard as he tried, it was impossible for him to get the feel, the depth, of such a loss. His best guess was a sense of insurmountable helplessness against ongoing pain. He wondered how a human being continued to live after that.
Then he thought of his father, who never knew what had happened to his family in Poland, but who had managed to carry this burden alone all his life. He wondered if a monstrous protectiveness had kept him from telling his children about his past.
Rafael returned to his seat. “After I heard what they did in Zokof, I joined the exiled Polish army in Russia. They had a general there who was looking for recruits. I wanted not to feel anymore, to be frozen, to take orders. What better place for me? The Poles made me an officer, put me at a desk. For me, it was a blessing not to be the Jew for that time. They knew, but they never said.”
Nathan cringed at how the word Jew could be one’s most significant trait in the eyes of other people.
Maybe Rafael saw this. “You are your father’s son,” he said. “You know the Four Sons we tell of at the Passover Seder—the Wise Son, the Wicked Son, the Simple Son, and the Son Who Doesn’t Know What to Ask?”
Nathan admitted he vaguely recalled reading this in the Reform Haggadah from which his family freely skipped whole sections in their flight toward the meal.
“Freidl always said Itzik was like the Wicked Son who asks, What does this night mean to you?Not us—as if he does not belong to the community.” He smiled. “She said the same thing about me too, after we got to know each other. You see, we have all been Wicked Sons, Leiber.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Nathan said. “But tell me, what’s this all about, this business with Freidl?”
Rafael sighed. “Yeh, it’s time. I will tell you. One night in Russia, I was on my way from one camp to the other. An old man in rags stepped out from the shadows. He spoke to me in Jewish, quietly. He told me I had to help him. He was starving, and the local people were treating him rough. Why waste food on an old Jew? I said all right, I would bring him food, but he would have to meet me outside the camp because if anyone saw, we would be shot for certain. He thanked me. Then, he said, ‘He who saves a life, saves the whole world.’ You know this expression?”
Nathan said he’d heard it before, but it hadn’t meant much to him. A platitude.
“I was in no mood for pretty words either,” Rafael agreed. “I said, ‘You’re talking to a man whose world is already dead.’ And this man, half-dead himself, takes me by the arm and says, ‘I also had a wife. I had four children. We are not here to make a perfect world, just a better one. That is what’s required. That is why, even in the gulag, I played tunes on my guitar, and when there was no guitar, I sang.’
“I did not want to know from his tunes or his gulags. I told him, ‘A guitar you won’t find here. I’m done with believing human gods. I’m done with Karl Marx.’
“This man said to me, ‘Marx? Are you meshuggeh? That’s Talmud, chaver—my comrade, my friend.’ Then he made a face. ‘But, what’s the difference?’ he said.”
Nathan remembered their earlier conversation about Marx and the Talmud. This time he didn’t argue.
“Leiber, I tell you, right then, in the middle of an open field with nothing but snow for miles around us, the idea of Marx and Talmud as the same, it was like God’s idea of a joke. We fell on each other, this man and me, like we were lost family. We cried and we coughed until we were bent in two. I gave him the crust of bread I had in my pocket, and he gave me his name—Hillel.”
Nathan got white as the curtain sheers. “The same Hillel as in the photograph with my father?”
“The same. And it was no coincidence. It was Freidl, making a shiddach—a connection between us.”
“What kind of connection was she trying to make?” Nathan asked.
“I didn’t know. I fed him. I did what I could to get him a roof over his head. We were a comfort to each other. He always had a tune. But later that winter, he was finished. Before he died, he gave me the three photographs he had kept with him always. There was one of his family, and one of an Indian warrior in America, a proud face. The last one was of your father, with him. I recognized Itzik, of course. I asked him, ‘How did you know this boy?’ He told me how he met Itzik and how Itzik went to America. Even with the war, all the disorganization of our lives, where I thought nothing could surprise me anymore, I was left without words, to hear this man, Hillel, bringing Itzik Leiber back into my life again. It was fantastic. Impossible. What was I to think?”
“Where are his photographs now, the one with my father?”
“I’m sorry, Leiber,” Rafael said. “They were stolen from my coat on the way home—a story to itself. It’s a shame. I would have given it to you.”
Nathan’s hope for hard proof sank. “Thanks anyway,” he said.
Rafael took a sip of tea. “I am not yet finished. You asked me about Freidl. There is more to tell. After the Annihilation, I came back home to Zokof. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Maybe, I thought, there’ll be someone left, someone I know. You have no idea how hungry I was to see a familiar face! Five thousand Jews we used to be here. There had to be someone.
“The first night, I hid in the forest near the cemetery. You see, we returning ones, we were afraid. We heard stories about Poles killing Jews when they came home. This happened. I knew people who died like that.”
Nathan believed him.
“The next night, I crept like a thief to Jewish houses in town and saw Poles were living there. For three nights I made my inventory. On the fourth night I knew I was the only one left. My life wasn’t worth a sucked egg.” He sighed.
“That night, while I slept in the forest, she came to me. Freidl. A beautiful woman, with such a voice—so strong and full of feeling.”
“An alto,” Nathan said absentmindedly, remembering his dream.
“‘Do not leave Zokof,’ she begged me. My heart bled. To hear the sound of Jewish for the first time in months and here, in my hometown. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. She answered me with words I remembered from my childhood. Lamentations, it is called in English. What we recite on the holy day of Tisha Bov, the day we remember the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.” He checked to see if any of this registered with Nathan.
Nathan only nodded at Rafael to continue.
“Freidl said to me: ‘He has blocked my ways with cut stones. He has made my paths a maze.’ I knew the words well. I said, ‘He has walled me in; I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy, and when I call and shout, He shuts out my prayer.’”
Tears began to roll down the crisscrossed tracks of Rafael’s face. “This woman knew what it was to suffer. She knows the dark night of the soul. By morning she was singing tunes to me. The old tunes. Little Zokof, we called our town.”
Nathan sat up straight. How could it be? How? He could hear the song Freidl had sung in his dream and at the cemetery. His ears once again felt as if they were filled with water. He felt unbalanced, faint. Little Zokof, little town. How I miss you so.
Rafael did not seem to notice Nathan’s distress. “I was so
glad to have her there,” he said, “someone to keep me from a loneliness you cannot imagine. There was nothing I could do to thank her, a lost soul. The stones, you understand, they were blocking the way to her grave. She could not rest. There was no peace for her.” He paused, stroked his beard. “She said she always knew that I would help her, for Itzik’s sake. But I was too young when Itzik left for America. She had to wait, and follow me. And now, it was time.”
Nathan was so moved by this, his resistance to Freidl, to the idea of her, began to weaken.
“You understand, something prevented her from going to America,” Rafael said. “I never knew what. But it seems I was her only connection back to that night, back to her gravesite, to peace. I did not know how to help her. I said to her, ‘I am angry at God. Please don’t ask me to appease Him. He thinks His people are so weak they require suffering to remain true to His word. Just because I remember the words of Lamentations from my childhood does not mean I say them today as a man who bows his head before God.’
“She said, ‘I am a woman who had to wait until I was in the grave to meet a child, and a man, whose lives I could touch. But still I believe in my God. And you must believe also.’ These were her exact words. I remember, because they made me weep. She tried to comfort me. She said, ‘You were saved by a boy named Itzik! Itzik means laugh.’ And she laughed and laughed until I laughed too.”
Nathan smiled, and continued to be drawn in, even charmed, by Rafael’s story.
“The next morning, she found a way to bring Jerzy to me. You remember Jerzy? We went to his apartment yesterday.”
“Yes, I remember. The apartment at the end of the hall,” Nathan said.
“‘You’re still here?’ Jerzy said to me. I didn’t know if he meant I had the chutzpah to still be alive or that he was surprised I came back.”
Nathan shuddered at such a rude homecoming.
“But he was a mensch,” Rafael said. “He told me, ‘The town needs a tailor, Rafael. Be our tailor, and we will live in peace. There’s a house I know for you.’
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 18