Afterward, the family took the urn with his ashes to Mount Auburn Cemetery and buried it in a shallow hole below a modern abstract sculpture. Her mother politely refused her father’s old friend Mort Grinberg’s offer to recite Kaddish. “Nathan wasn’t a believer. Why be hypocritical?” she said.
Ellen hadn’t disagreed. But she felt the absence of ritual at the burial site, as if they had not done right by him somehow, that the job of laying him to rest was unfinished.
Later, when they all returned home, she excused herself and went upstairs to her father’s study. She opened the cabinet with the gravestone. Wedged next to it, she found a round Plexiglas canister on which a meadow scene had been painted. Inside was a tightly sealed bag and a note addressed to Rafael. Seeing her father’s almost impenetrably tight script again brought tears to her eyes. It read, “I am sure you will find my daughter Ellen a more winning student than I of your impressive body of knowledge. Here at home, I am finding the meadow and planting a seed. In the meantime, I hope you both enjoy this sugar for your tea.”
She took the canister and note from the cabinet, realizing he had intended her to take it to Poland. Underneath it, she found a manila envelope containing several documents. They appeared to be some kind of trust account, with Rafael Bergson as the beneficiary of a monthly stipend for the remainder of his life. She also found a paper, signed by her father, that seemed to indicate that although he was the sole source of these funds, the beneficiary had been given to understand that they had been collected from “elderly Bundists in America.” Her father, it said, preferred that this understanding not be corrected in the event of his incapacity or death.
Although Ellen had no idea what Bundists were, she began to weep. “Oh, Dad,” she said, muffling her cry with her hand. She scanned the shelves for the two books she had come to his study to retrieve.
“I want you to take a look at this book,” her father had said at the end of their last session. “It’s called the Tanakh, the Jewish bible.”
She had taken the book from him hesitantly. “Why do you want to give this to me?” she had asked, believing a history of Poland might have been more useful.
“Read it. You’ll recognize a lot of the stories. I think you’ll find it useful when you meet Rafael. Read the section called Lamentations. You’ll be amazed. It’s pure poetry. Actually, I’ve been surprised at how much our orientation to the world is based on this one book.” He had reached into the top drawer of his desk and taken out a blue booklet.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a prayer book. I picked it up at Sol Litvak’s funeral a few months ago. El Molei Rachamim is in here, the prayer for the dead. You might want to recite it in the cemetery.”
She had opened the booklet. Next to the transliterations, it was filled with indecipherable Hebrew letters, punctuated by dots and dashes. Her grandpa Isaac was the only one in the family who could read this stuff, she thought, and he had called it crap—the Opiate of the People. She could still hear him saying it.
“Wouldn’t Grandpa go nuts if he knew we were reading this?”
“I’m not so sure,” her father said.
She had managed to forget to take either of the books home with her that day. Maybe, if she had to be perfectly honest, she had done it on purpose. The idea of her father giving her religious books gave her the creeps. Now, with a terrible sense of guilt, she gathered them both in her arms to take with her to Poland.
On the train ride back to New York, she wrote Rafael a letter informing him of her father’s death, and asking him if he would meet with her when she arrived in Poland that summer.
25
IN EARLY JULY 1993, ELLEN LEFT FOR POLAND. SHE AWOKE during the descent to Warsaw’s Okecia Airport, eager to follow her father’s path into the city. She had even avoided looking at photographs of Warsaw so that she could begin her trip by seeing what he had seen. At the baggage claim, she expertly bungee-corded her duffel to the top of her enormous wheeled suitcase, amused by the curious glances her blue cowboy boots were attracting. Then she boarded the bus to the city center and took a window seat.
Her first impressions were not promising. Along the wide boulevard she saw imposing but unremarkable gray apartments, a dirty glass-and-concrete building crowned with the yellow IKEA logo, and the strangely inert, fatigued faces of commuters in passing red trolleys. By the time she was in view of the Palace of Culture and Science, she had jettisoned her father’s warnings and had categorized Warsaw as one of those drab, if practical, cities populated by people dressed ten years out of date, but as safe and bright as an electric bulb.
In the underground passageway leading to the Central Railway Station, she dropped a few dollars into the hat of a street musician as a gesture of her goodwill to the country. Then she boarded the express train for the two and a half hour ride to Kraków.
From the doorway of her second-class compartment, an elderly couple observed her struggles as she stood on her seat, hauling her luggage onto the rack.
“Czesc. Hello.” Ellen smiled down at them, glad to at last make use of her Polish language tape.
Rather doubtfully, the couple smiled back, then took their seats opposite as Ellen continued to push her bags into place. The man’s shirt and jacket were worn, but his wool vest and wide tie lent him a certain old-fashioned propriety. He opened his newspaper. His wife spread a white doily across the width of her prodigious lap and began to crochet, her thick fingers moving with the unconscious assurance of habit.
Ellen took her seat and thumbed through one of her Polish tour books, hunting for information about the route from Warsaw to Kraków. The book pictured a historic Poland, but when the train emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the Vistula River, she was disappointed to find herself in an industrial area that more closely resembled Newark, New Jersey.
Not long after, she caught the elderly woman stealing glances at her. When Ellen smiled, the woman burst forth in a profusion of Polish. Ellen looked at her regretfully. “Nie mówie po polsku—I don’t speak Polish,” she said. She opened her father’s Polish phrase book and gamely attempted to explain that she was an American and that she was going to Kraków for two months.
The woman pointed at Ellen’s blue cowboy boots, which seemed to amaze her, and offered an apple. Dziekuje bardzo, Ellen thanked her, and in her best sign language, she admired the woman’s crochet work. The woman’s face flushed with pride, and revealed a faded blue-eyed prettiness. They smiled at each other several more times and ate their apples. In pantomime, the woman asked if Ellen had sewn the filmy green layered skirt she was wearing. She reached forward and fingered it approvingly when Ellen nodded yes.
Soon after, Ellen closed her eyes and drifted off, dreaming of a misted forest filled with melodies, all in a minor key. The pleasing romance of it lulled her to sleep.
When she awoke, the train was cutting across lush, soft hills dotted with black and white cows and lopsided, unpainted barns. She saw wooden villages and farmers on horse-drawn wagons plowing oddly thin strips of land, bordered in the distance by the delicate outline of birch trees. Utterly charmed, she felt her faith in her tour book’s Poland restored.
The elderly woman tapped her on the knee. Her husband had pulled bread and sausage from the basket planted between his feet. He pressed some into her hand with an encouraging nod, and she accepted. “Dziekuje, Dziekuje,” she thanked him, and told him the food was delicious. She wondered how they saw her, an American girl, with her perfect white orthodonture and the shadows under her “Linden family eyes,” as her mother called them, artfully covered by liquid concealer.
The woman somehow communicated they were going to visit their son, who lived in Nowa Huta, outside Kraków. Ellen showed them her tour book and looked up the town, only to learn that Nowa Huta was an ecological disaster, a postwar steelworks built by the communist government. “Over decades, Nowa Huta’s intensive industrialization has turned the region’s rivers into sewers and filled t
he air with smog in nearby Kraków as well, where its gases and acid rain are methodically eating away at the city’s stone,” the book said. She looked up at the couple’s expectant faces and smiled, not wanting to insult their civic pride. “Nowa Huta,” she said, with growing concern at spending two months immersed in so much pollution. She pointed to the town’s name in the book. Pronaszko certainly hadn’t mentioned the problem.
They passed a massive cross planted along the road, its base strewn with bunches of flowers. She wondered if there was a memorial like that in Zokof for the Polish peasant her father said had died at her grandfather’s hand. She was glad she had not heard this when her grandfather was alive. As it was, she had always suspected he’d had secrets. He’d been so difficult to know. The way he turned serious questions about his life into jokes had always made her feel he was evading her, that he didn’t trust her, or even that he was laughing at her for some reason.
But then, her father wasn’t exactly a trustworthy reporter either. He got so distracted by his own tension that he often misunderstood facts and circumstances. Worse, he misread people. For all she knew, Rafael Bergson might just have been telling him some local tall tale about the death of a peasant. She wanted to know the real reason he had given her father the gravestone. This was what she meant to find out when she met him. The thought of it excited her. Turning from the window, she closed her eyes again and was comforted by the gentle sway of the train.
By afternoon, the church spires of Kraków’s skyline rose like graceful fingers in the distance. As they drew closer, Ellen was thrilled by the sight of its green copper and rust-colored roofs, and the stone facades. At the station, she said good bye to the elderly couple and dragged her ridiculously heavy load from the platform. The hazy air had a distinctive burned smell she could not identify. She assumed it was some vestige of Nowa Huta.
She found a driver to take her to her hotel. On the way, her concerns about pollution dissipated at the sight of so many architectural collisions—medieval battlements beside stately eighteenth-century townhouses, domed churches nestled beside the Baroque exteriors of stylish modern boutiques. The entire center of the city seemed to be surrounded by a greenbelt with benches and paths for strolling. She sat back, happy to have found her way to a city of human scale, to a place more beautiful than anything she had been led to expect.
The taxi slowed at a small square. Bright modern art posters hung from the buildings in marvelous juxtaposition to the stuccoed friezes that decorated the eaves. Ellen sensed a tremendous free-floating creative energy about the place.
Her driver didn’t speak English. But moments later, when they pulled up to the Palace Residence Hotel, he pointed down the block. “Rynek Główny—Market Square,” he said, nodding meaningfully, in what she took as a proud attempt to orient her to his city.
She had worked out an arrangement with Pronaszko to stay at this hotel, rather than at the less costly room in a private home that he had originally offered her. She would have preferred the room because it afforded an opportunity to meet local people. But its location had sent her mother into a state of extreme anxiety. “I want you to stay in the center of the city. I’ve talked to people who’ve been to Kraków. It’s the safest area,” she’d insisted.
The Palace Residence Hotel, as it turned out, was a respectable turn-of-the-century European establishment, which, behind its white stone facade, had a small, modest lobby. Ellen checked in at the front desk, accepted the porter’s offer of assistance with her bags, and noted the hotel’s one truly palatial feature—a sweeping marble staircase better suited to women in evening gowns than American girls in cowboy boots.
They took the elevator. On the third floor, she followed the porter down a wide hall to her room. She liked the architectural detail of her door, tucked inside a niche. Inside, the entryway was almost blocked by an enormous armoire with a large oval mirror. As she squeezed past it, she took a quick look at the rudimentary kitchenette to her left, next to which was a small bathroom equipped, in the European manner, with a bidet and a poorly located showerhead.
The bedroom had an extremely high ceiling, which had the effect of dwarfing the low, lumpy double bed. Angled at its foot was an upholstered wingback armchair.
The heavy decor might have put Ellen into a funk if the French windows hadn’t opened onto a view of flower boxes on the rococo building across the way. Best of all, on a small table below the window was a gorgeous flower arrangement with a welcoming message from Konstantin Pronaszko. He wrote, “I imagine that after your long journey you will want to have a quiet evening. If you are not too tired, may I suggest you take a short stroll to Rynek Główny before you retire. It’s quite a nice introduction to our city.” He closed with directions to the dance studio, where she was to meet him and the company the next morning at ten o’clock, and his best wishes for their collaborative efforts.
Delighted, Ellen called home. “Mom, I love Kraków! The hotel is great. Perfect location. Konstantin Pronaszko sent me flowers! I’m going over to the studio at ten tomorrow!” She said all this practically in one breath, not caring at all that she sounded like a ten-year-old. She wanted her mother to understand that her father had missed seeing a whole other Poland. She only wished she could have told him so herself. Again, as it had many times over the past months, the finality of his loss hit her hard.
“So the trip was all right? You managed to get to the train without any trouble?” her mother asked.
“No trouble. Just a lot of schlepping,” Ellen assured her, enjoying her grandpa Isaac’s word.
“That’s good. That’s very good.” Her mother sounded relieved. “Call me again tomorrow, after you meet the dance company. And, Ellen, be careful in the street. I hear they drink heavily there.”
Her mother’s worry only reminded Ellen of her father’s ceaseless protectiveness, so especially fierce about Poland, and how much she actually missed it now. She still imagined him so easily, in his robe in the study, fiddling with the blue Venetian paperweight, and a longing for him passed over her with the strength of someone seizing her from behind.
That evening, when she walked the few blocks to Rynek Główny, she was not disappointed by Pronaszko’s recommendation. Strings of tiny lights hung, jewellike, on the trees that lined its perimeter, creating a soft glow over the elegant cafés. The square was bisected by a long, ornate building with huge arched arcades along the ground floor, and crowned with an intricate parapet. According to her tour book it was a Renaissance Cloth Hall, now filled with tourist shopping stalls. On the other side of the Cloth Hall was a massive statue of someone identified on the plaque as Adamowi Mickiewiczowi. Ellen stopped for coffee at café Malma, and read that Adam Mickiewicz was a national poet. What an extraordinary people, she thought, to erect a statue of a poet in their main square. She wished she could have told this to her dad.
The clock tower pealed high above the square. From a church tower diagonally across, a bugle played a sharp, high melody that stopped in midnote, apparently to commemorate a guard who sounded a warning of a thirteenth-century Tartar invasion and was silenced by an arrow in his throat. They called the tune the hejnał, according to her tour book. She walked back to the hotel, bouncy with happiness at the city and excited about the next day.
Early the following morning, she rolled the sides of her leotard over her tights to her hip bones and knotted her batik silk dress in a handful of places so it would billow slightly when she walked. Finally, she pulled on a pair of beige high heeled boots, determined to show Kraków a bit of style.
At 9:00 a.m. she was out the door of the hotel to get an early look at the dance studio and to warm up before meeting the company. The warm humidity had heightened the smell of pollution in the air. She walked through the smoggy haze that had settled over Rynek Główny and entered one of the narrow streets on its far side. A few blocks farther, she located the stucco facade of the address Pronaszko had given her and opened the wrought iron gate. Before her w
as a short, dank passageway, permeated by the smell of old vegetables. It opened onto a bright cobblestoned courtyard where the last thing she expected to see was a video shop. But there it was, complete with the Polish version of The Terminator in the window, next to a weird little store with clothes that looked like bridal dresses for children.
Ellen entered the wide, open doorway at the back of the courtyard and began to climb the stone stairs. The risers listed to the left, and the tread of feet, marching up and down over centuries, had left little hollows in the steps. Thick wads of dust bunched in the curves of the iron banisters.
On the fourth floor, the lion knocker on the studio door might once have been a fine wood carving. But it had been painted over so many times it now looked merely globular. An old woman with reddened hands mopped the landing floor. A wisp of gray hair dangled down the middle of her broad forehead. She seemed to have expected Ellen because, with a few muttered words, she unlocked the studio door. “Dziekuje,” Ellen thanked her.
Alone, she stripped to her leotard and tights. Warped mirrors ran the length of the wall opposite the courtyard windows. They swelled and shrank her five feet seven inches every three or four steps. She clipped up the copper-colored mass of her hair and sat on the floor to stretch and calm her nerves.
The morning sun shone through the long windows. Legs wide, she reached sideways, head facing up, and noticed that whole chunks of molding were missing from the white ceiling. It reminded her of a certain studio where she used to take class in New York, above a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue in the Forties. It had the same dry smell of accumulated dirt, the same sooty windows and water bugs.
She stood up and brushed the wooden floor slats with the soles of her bare feet, trying out some movement sequences. After the long flight, it felt good to move again, to watch, with a certain detached pride, how well her body responded to the demands of the art.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 22