She began a series of jumps and rolls, but dizziness overtook her. For a moment, everything looked a little green. Her ears became plugged, as if she was underwater, and she was forced to sit down, cross-legged, and rest her head in her hands. Quavering, distant sounds, almost melodic, rippled through her ear canal. She’d never had an experience like this before and wondered if it was jet lag. For several minutes she listened, out of breath, her heart racing in the silent room. Gradually, the dizzy sensation stopped. She lay down on her back, in the yoga position of repose, and closed her eyes.
At nine forty-five the door opened and a blond girl in a mauve raincoat walked in. She was about a head shorter than Ellen. In her pink leotard and tights, her hair pulled into a tight bun, she looked like a ballet dancer. Ellen, who had regained her equilibrium by then and was stretching at the barre, thought she must have startled the girl because, for a second, the girl just stared. But then she smiled and shuffled to the mirror to unpack her things. In profile, her flat, wide nose was almost saddle-shaped.
Assuming the girl might not speak much more English than she spoke Polish, Ellen said, “Ellen Linden,” and pointed to herself. She brushed away several long, corkscrew tendrils that had escaped from her hair clip.
The girl smiled. “Yes, from America,” she said in a child’s voice. “Genia Slabczyńska,” she said, pointing to herself.
Ellen wasn’t sure she could even repeat that last name, much less remember it, but to relieve the awkwardness, she nodded enthusiastically and returned to her stretches. Again the door opened. This time, a tight cluster of dancers entered, two slight, fair-skinned young men and a gamine like girl with a short haircut and an elongated neck. The girl was laughing. They all paused when they saw Ellen. One of the young men waved. The others smiled in her direction.
Pronaszko had assured her that most of his dancers knew some English but that he would have a translator available for her. At that moment, though, she felt badly handicapped at not being able to make small talk. In her experience, dance companies were tight, intrigue-packed worlds. The choreographer who ventured into their midst always had to tread carefully.
Several more dancers filed in, each of them announced by the walloping sound of the door closing, until the company, in various stages of peeling down to their leotards and sweatpants, was assembled. Some stretched against the wall; others chatted in pairs or in groups. Ellen smiled whenever one of them looked her way. They smiled back, but none of them approached her. She continued her stretches. It was all very awkward.
At long last, Konstantin Pronaszko sauntered in wearing a cape, a particularly odd form of apparel given the warm temperature. He was talking to an ash-blond young man with a gelled angle cut and the face of a god. Ellen went to greet Pronaszko.
Pronaszko turned abruptly from the young man. “Ellen! You’ve arrived! God be praised!” he said, rather more for the benefit of the company than for her, she thought.
The phrase struck Ellen as peculiar, and she laughed, wondering what God had to do with her arrival. Pronaszko looked at her quizzically. His eyes were deep blue. Inscrutable. He took her hand, to shake it, she thought. But before she could say a word, he bowed slightly, like some character out of the nineteenth century, and kissed her right above the knuckles. She stared down at the crown of his head, at the fading blond hair of his princely bowl cut, more alarmed than charmed at his greeting—especially in front of the entire company.
The ash-blond god put his things down and walked over to them.
“Please,” Pronaszko said to her, with his now-signature bow. “This is Andrzej. He is the translator I promised to make available to you.” He smiled and, with a hint of gleeful mischievousness, said, “But not too available, yeh?”
“Of course not,” Andrzej interjected, in a manner both amused and detached. He turned to Ellen. “Nice to meet you,” he said. He had cigarette breath, but a beautiful smile.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she said.
“Of course.” His eyes lingered, in the manner of men used to flirting.
Ellen thought he could be the quickest route to making an ass of herself. Looks were already flying between members of the company. Andrzej turned to them and made a short remark. Everyone but Ellen laughed, since he smiled at her but did not translate.
No way, she thought, and shrugged at him good-naturedly.
Pronaszko, meanwhile, apparently found this exchange quite amusing. He called the class to order, then formally introduced Ellen to the company, with much flourish over her choreographic accomplishments. Andrzej translated.
Ellen thanked Pronaszko, said she was looking forward to working with him and with the company, and apologized for her inadequate Polish. “You’ll be amazed at how much English they know, when it suits them.” Pronaszko winked at her. “Isn’t that so, Henryk?”
The short muscular fellow grinned. “Oh, yes,” he enunciated slowly.
Ellen felt better. She decided it would be more politic to participate than to watch class, and Pronaszko approved of her joining them.
His class was a smattering of Martha Graham and Cunningham techniques, ballet, and a dash of Twyla Tharp-type frenetic kinetics. He was showing her what they could do. All through class, he pounded out syncopated rhythms with a heavy, carved wooden cane and recited odd but affecting poetic phrases in his big, dramatic voice.
They were good dancers, some of them very good. But she could see that every one of them had begun with ballet. They had that look that afflicts all ballet dancers, a sort of articulate puppetry. Ellen wondered if they would be willing to give up their technique and go with what she would want from them, or if they would resist her ideas of postmodern choreography.
Near the end of class, when the studio smelled richly of sweat and towels hung limply around dancers’ necks, Pronaszko announced, “Today, in honor of our American friend, we will do some improvisational work.”
The group rustled, exchanged looks. They seemed a bit agitated, but Ellen didn’t know why, since improvisation was pretty standard fare for modern dancers.
Pronaszko surveyed the class, clearly enjoying the drama he was creating. “You will each improvise the movement in a work of art,” he said.
Ellen hoped her face didn’t reveal that she thought the assignment trite. Kids’ stuff. She sat cross-legged on the floor, assuming he wouldn’t volunteer her to be first. She had no idea what he had in mind, and anyway, she didn’t want to serve as an example of what was good or bad. If he liked what she did, it would put more pressure on the company and they’d hate her. If she was bad, she would lose credibility as a choreographer.
“Ellen, perhaps you’d like to begin.”
Annoyed, she walked to the middle of the floor, stood in thought for a moment, then gathered Adam Mickiewicz’s imaginary robes around her, cupped his book in her hand, and executed a series of her trademark movement phrases. When she finished, the dancers glanced at one another nervously and began a slow, polite applause. Ellen thought this odd. Applauding improvs was not part of her world’s etiquette. Pronaszko winked at her.
She turned to Andrzej. “Please tell everyone I was the statue of the man who’s standing in Rynek Główny.”
He looked at her, all amusement, and translated. The poet’s name was repeated around the room. But instead of having the effect of warming her to them, they seemed to regard her with some suspicion.
She spent the rest of class watching the others perform their improvisations. They did so with varying degrees of success but with increasing humor, most of which she didn’t understand. Then Andrzej took his turn. He clearly took special pleasure in performing some very dated hip-hitching jazz moves, which he seemed to think sexy but which, to Ellen, were just funny.
When class ended, he came up behind her. “You should have done an American,” he said flatly.
“What’s wrong with Adam Mickiewicz?”
“We call him Ada,” he said coldly. “Nothing is wrong with him. Bu
t how can an American dance to the poet of Poland’s spirit? This is like a deaf person pretending to hear music or an atheist pretending to know God.”
Ellen’s face became very hot. “I didn’t mean to insult anyone,” she muttered, quickly gathering her things.
Pronaszko interrupted. “Ellen, I would like to invite you for lunch.”
“I’d love to,” she replied, unsure if he had heard what Andrzej had said but grateful for his intervention.
“Unfortunately, today I have an important meeting with one of our benefactors.” He pronounced the last word with gravity.
She smiled gamely. He asked her how she liked her hotel, and they discussed the living quarters he had arranged for her. “I promise, we will have our lunch,” he said. “A dinner would be better. More expensive, anyway.” He winked at Ellen’s deflated face. “Go, have a look at our city today,” he encouraged her. “Come back fresh to us tomorrow.”
By this time, the company had already dispersed. She slowly walked back to her hotel, not knowing what to do with herself for the rest of the day. As a hedge against her anxiety, she began to study the street more closely. Pollution had blackened the buildings, pocking and wearing away their facades and bas reliefs. But the pair of old wooden entry doors, hanging awry like broken arms, filled her with shame at her loneliness.
26
UPON RETURNING TO HER ROOM, ELLEN CALLED HER MOTHER. If her father had been alive she would have admitted that her first day with the company had been difficult and that she was pretty depressed. But she had learned that the death of a parent creates an imbalance that is less forgiving of normal family complaints.
“Today was fine. Really fine. It was a good class, just a little weird in Polish. I couldn’t talk much to anyone,” she said in her bright upper register. She described the cobbled streets, the courtyards, the hejnalج the amber earrings she’d just bought at the Cloth Hall. Taking a small risk, she said she wished Dad could have seen all this too. The silence that followed this remark made her add, “This afternoon I’m going to visit the castle in the middle of the city. It’s on the top of a fortified hill.”
“By yourself?” Her mother sounded alarmed.
“Yes, by myself. It’s totally safe.” What Ellen wasn’t going to admit was that she felt unmoored, that she’d have preferred to work, to connect, not to loll hours away on tourist attractions. “You know how I am when I travel. I like to scope out a city alone. Anyway, this place is called Wawel.” She cleared her throat and affected a deep tourist guide’s voice. “This was the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years.”
“I see,” her mother said.
“No, really, there’s a whole museum complex up there, and a cathedral.” She was aware of working too hard for her mother’s approval.
“Don’t you have work to do with the company?”
From the careful tone her mother used, Ellen knew she had detected something was wrong. “Today is sort of an off day. There’s nothing scheduled until tomorrow.” She hoped her mother wouldn’t ask why because she had no answer, which, in itself, was worrisome.
“I thought there’d be some sort of reception for you tonight,” her mother suggested.
Ellen crumpled into a ball on the lumpy bed and tried to keep her voice even. This was something her father would have said. Receptions for visitors were the specialty of academicians. They were something her mother, who’d traveled often with him, had grown to expect. Meanwhile, she hadn’t even thought about how she was going to get through the evening. “They don’t do that kind of thing,” she told her mother, in what she hoped was a casual voice.
“But some kind of welcome would seem appropriate,” her mother insisted.
Tears popped over Ellen’s lower lids as if they’d been waiting in the wings for their cue. They dripped sloppily off her nose and onto her pillow. She wiped her eyes. “Pronaszko said he wanted to take me out to lunch but he had some kind of fund-raising meeting. We’re going to do dinner another day.” But even this now seemed tenuous to her.
“I see,” her mother said, in a way that sounded doubtful and judgmental of Pronaszko. For that, Ellen loved her fiercely. She gripped the phone hand piece, straining to be closer to home. Finally, she realized she had to let go. “Mom, this is costing a fortune. I’ll call you tomorrow night, okay?”
“So everything’s fine?”
“Everything’s fine.”
They said good bye.
She threw on a pair of jeans and the comforting blue cowboy boots. On her way out the door, she grabbed some scarves and her short mustard silk jacket from the armoire.
By the time she’d reached the impressive sight of Wawel Hill, some fifteen minutes’ walk from her hotel, she felt much better, even though it looked like rain. The wind had picked up. She began the climb up the narrow stone ramp that led to the complex of buildings on top. To her left, dark redbrick fortifications supported the hill. On her right, a steep, lush embankment plunged to the street. About halfway up, under a tree, a costumed Polish folk group was playing for a scattering of German tourists. She stopped to listen. Raindrops began pattering onto the leaves of the tree, but she stayed where she was.
The music reminded her of her mother, who’d brought home ethnic recordings ever since Ellen could remember—obscure Russian balladeers, Nana Mouskouri, Odetta, and Miriam Makeba. She’d spent much of her childhood dancing to foreign tunes, wrapped in scarves and loopy ensembles, banging a tambourine while her mother stomped along behind her, clapping and encouraging her to dance and dance and dance.
Ellen slipped some zlotys into the musicians’ basket and continued up the steep incline. The city’s street sounds receded. The spire of Wawel Cathedral rose directly above her. At the top of the hill, she joined the small groups of visitors passing through the castle gate, heading left the short distance to the entrance of the great cathedral.
Inside, the smell of burning wax from hundreds of flickering votive candles permeated the gigantic vaulted space. Her boots echoed on the stone floor. She walked slowly down a side aisle, rolling her heels to muffle their sound in the hushed atmosphere.
The ornate chapels, many of them closed off with grilles, looked to her like miniature stage sets. She peered into one and saw a painting of Saint Sebastian. As a child, she’d pulled her mother from room to room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, looking for all the paintings she could find of the saint. Her mother had thought her ghoulish for counting the number of arrows stuck in him at every painting—under the armpit, in the thigh, through the ribs. She’d had no idea who he was. Years later, finding him again in the galleries of European museums, she’d realized it hadn’t been fascination with his torture that had drawn her to Saint Sebastian. It was his peculiar nakedness, so unnecessary for a man being executed by arrow. The unspoken secret in all these portraits, it had seemed to her, was how many painters had used him, of all the saints, as a model for the suggestiveness of a beautiful young man, tied helplessly to a tree. But now, as she stood looking at the painting in the Wawel chapel, she sensed from the dense Polish iconography that some other allusion to the saint was being made, that a conversation among Poles, something about martyrdom, was under way in that space. Intrigued, she moved down the nave toward the central altar, instinctively running her hands along the cold stone smoothness of the royal carved sarcophagi as she went.
She noticed a middle aged couple seated in a pew. Their faces, lit in profile by the votive lights, flickered in and out of shadow like a Rembrandt painting. Ellen sank onto a bench and scanned the twenty or thirty faithful bowed in prayer throughout the cathedral. Stout, ruddy peasants and urban sophisticates alike, on their knees. What did these people think about in that pose? she wondered. Were they forming words of atonement or reciting wish lists to God?
This need to pray had baffled her since she was eight years old, the night her parents went out for the evening and Grandpa Isaac had told her the rocket story. She remembered how he ha
d shuffled into her room and stood at the foot of her bed, not knowing where to put himself in the glow of her nightlight.
“Your grandmother sent me up to tell you a story. I don’t know from stories,” he’d said.
Maybe he’d thought she’d let him go, send him back downstairs with a good excuse. Instead, feeling very grown up, she’d patted the coverlet and said, “Sit on my bed, Grandpa. You can read me a story. Dad’s been reading me Hans Brinker.”
“Oy, Gottenu,” he’d said, which meant no. She didn’t yet realize that Grandpa Isaac could barely read in English. He’d rolled his big dark eyes upward and sat down. Ellen had always loved her grandfather’s eyes. She used to think he stored wisdom in the great domes of his lids. “What kind of story you want to hear?”
She chose carefully. “Tell me about heaven,” she’d said. In the Linden family, this was the equivalent of asking about sex. Her parents wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever she asked, all they wanted to know was who put the idea in her head. Once, she told them her friend Mary Sorentino had said God lived in heaven behind pearly gates. They were speechless. “We, we don’t believe in that,” her mom had finally stammered.
“What do we believe?” Ellen had asked.
“In nature,” her dad had said.
“You don’t have to believe in nature,” Ellen had argued. “Nature is all around us. You can touch it. What if God made nature?”
“There is no such thing as God,” her father had said.
She knew she’d hit the outer wall of what could be discussed. And that night with Grandpa, she knew she was taking a chance asking him about heaven too. The thing she didn’t understand was why they got so upset with her for asking.
“Oy, Gottenu,” Grandpa had said again.
Then they were both quiet. She had stared at his bald head. Its shape reminded her of an egg.
He’d cleared his throat. “The only story about heaven is there is no story.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 23