“You survived,” Ellen suggested.
“Yes.” He nodded thoughtfully. “After the war, in towns all over Poland, towns like Zokof, the Poles did not make confessions to Jews.” He glanced up at her. “They made pogroms.” His gruff voice was barely audible. “They don’t like that word here, pogroms. They say pogroms were only in Russia. But in Kielce—you passed it on your way here—they killed forty two survivors, wounded hundreds. After. After! You understand?”
She did not. Nor did she understand his change of mood.
He narrowed his enormous eyes and appraised her as he raised a cautionary forefinger. “Ellen,” he said in a low voice, “about this, your father was not wrong. You are in a land of unrepentant evil.”
Ellen felt a twinge at her temples. She realized then why he had sent the stone to America. It had been an act of protection, of unselfish love. How difficult it must have been for him to give it up. “Why don’t you come to America?” she said. “We could sponsor you.”
He shook his head. “For me, at my age, it hardly matters anymore. The only move I will make now is from here to the grave.”
She tried to protest.
He waved her off. “Every life has its end. But it is a mistake to think that if you turn your back to evil it will not follow you.”
Ellen thought of Freidl’s gravestone, wrapped and hidden in her father’s cabinet. She knew Rafael wanted her to do something about it. But she didn’t know what.
Rafael sighed. “Could you pour me a glass of tea? I’m a little dry.”
Ellen refilled the glass and handed it to him. His fingertips were cold. She placed her hand over his, as if to steady the glass, but really she meant to insulate the warmth that already seemed to be ebbing from his body.
He took several short sips and put down the glass.
“You look like you could use a rest. How do you feel?” she said.
“Feel? I feel like a man old enough to touch a woman not his wife and not fear God for it.” He smiled distractedly. “Did your father tell you that when I was a young man, I had a wife and a child?”
Ellen shook her head.
“In sleep they came back to me. For years.” He clenched his hands in his lap.
It seemed to Ellen this clenching of his hands caused him additional pain.
“From them, I heard the mamaloshen—the mother language. My daughter, my Sonya, when I dreamed, was a young woman already. How could it be, to grow in death? I wondered. But they came to me. They were women together, my wife and my daughter. She would tell her mother, ‘I am going to bake a challah for Poppa. A braided challah.’” He gestured an imaginary challah about two feet long. “Eggs and raisins is what they talked about. And how to lay the challah in the oven. But after so many years, my wife, my daughter, they left. Maybe it was because I forgot already how women talk to each other.”
“You’ve been alone a long time,” Ellen said understandingly. She got up and went to the front window, to try to absorb this newest layer of loss in his life. A car had pulled up to the house across the narrow lane, and a man and a woman got out, talking as they shut their doors. They saw her. She waved at them tentatively, but they did not wave back. Ellen stared after them as they went into their house, depressed by the sense of isolation their coldness had engendered. “Why did you stay here for Freidl? What good did it do?” she asked Rafael.
He sighed again. “Good. Heh. You are right. That God will not let her rest, this, you think, has something to do with good?” He tilted back his head awkwardly and let out a dry, rasping laugh. “We think maybe God was not satisfied that she did good enough by Itzik, who you call Isaac. He did not believe, maybe, that she could do better in America with him. So He kept her here, with me, to wait. She got the idea that she should do something for me, to make me remember that once I feared God. That this might be good. Who else could she care for? I am the only one left. You see, before the war I was a socialist. After, when I came back to Zokof, I believed in nothing, and I was not afraid of God. God? I said. If He was in the world, what could He do anymore to put fear in me? What He could do was done.” Rafael pursed his lips until they disappeared under his mustache. “If God could take my wife and my child, He was a fool, I said. I did not accept this idea that God acts with a greater purpose, not when He allows evil to ruin His creation.”
Rafael pressed his hand to his yarmulke. “I thought maybe it was time for God to be afraid now. I thought, He knows that for what he did to my wife and child, I should curse Him. I am not Job that He should play tricks on me, to make my life a misery.”
Ellen was relieved to at least know who Job was, even if she did not entirely understand the trick to which Rafael referred.
“Freidl came to me,” Rafael said. “‘Be a mensch,’ she said. This made me weep because I saw how much of the mensch in me was gone. That I was a man lost to myself.” He shook his head. “Maybe you are too young to understand such things.”
“Tell me anyway,” Ellen said, wanting very much to understand him.
“When I was at the end of my hope, she said to me, ‘Believe in your God. He brought you to me.’” He looked at Ellen. “That God would come back to me and I to God, this was almost too much for me. Should a man be asked to bear such a thing? After what He took? This is what I asked Freidl. But she said, ‘Be a mensch.’”
He shrugged. “What was I to say to this? I could say, a dead woman I never met cannot come to me and tell me to be a mensch. I am talking to myself. I am putting words in her mouth I do not want to say myself. But in the end, what does it matter if it is her speaking or me? Maybe it is God telling me, Rafael, be a mensch. In the end, I said, all right, what is, is. I put on the tallis and the tefillin, and I prayed as a Jew, every morning, afternoon, and night. It gave me comfort. And in time, with Freidl, I began to study again like I did as a boy in cheder.”
He looked at her. She understood cheder. That was the school he was coming from the night he and her grandfather met the peasant with the whip.
“I went from house to house here in Zokof. I asked the Poles here for Hebrew books they found from before the war. They handed them over. What did they want with them? And I think it made them feel better, that they did this, something decent. Some of them told me who gave them this book or that. Some kept them for a memory; some remembered where they were told books were buried.” He swept his arm around the room, at the shelves of books. “Behold the Jews of Zokof, Am Ha Sefer—the People of the Book.” He nodded. “With Freidl I read in Hebrew, the father language, and in time, my faith was returned. My God is not a fool.”
He smiled slightly. “I light the candles on Friday night, like a woman, to welcome the Sabbath. I do this because she cannot. I do this for my wife and daughter, because they cannot.” He pulled absently at his sleeve. “She stands behind me in this room, at this table. I feel her presence, watching me.”
Once again, Ellen noticed how he talked about Freidl in the present tense. “Does that mean that if Freidl returns to her grave, you’ll be alone?”
He began to rock back and forth.
“Is that why you waited for my father to find you, instead of you finding him?”
The rocking increased. He closed his eyes.
Ellen couldn’t bear to push him any further.
“I didn’t want to let her go,” he said softly. “I don’t want to let her go. But it’s a shonda, my shonda, what I did. A sin, you understand?” His eyes remained shut.
“It’s not a sin to want to talk to someone. You’re all alone.”
“She needed me to find Itzik.”
Ellen could scarcely believe he could be saying that a dead woman had asked him to find her grandfather. But then she remembered Freidl had told her that Marek, the langer loksh, would return with her to Zokof, and in her dream, Ellen hadn’t doubted her at all. Why would Rafael?
“It was after the war. I promised her I would find him. He was in Brooklyn, New York. I wrote. He answered. He said he would n
ever come back to Poland. That’s all. He would never come back. And he would not pray.” Rafael recited these facts in a mechanical manner, as if he had examined them many times before. His hand dropped to his side. “Ach! Itzik. Itzik the Faithless One!”
Tears fell from his cheeks, like her grandfather’s at the Passover Seder. Ellen dug around in her backpack and produced some tissues for him.
Rafael wiped his eyes and tried to smile. “Mine mensch. That is what she calls me. But sometimes I don’t know. I am confused. What is true, what is my imagination? I see things, not just Freidl. Across the market square, I see the back of my neighbor, Yossl Greenberg, from the old days. I open my mouth to call to him, ‘Yossl, it’s me. Rafael Bergson!’ But always it is the same. The man turns around. It is not Yossl Greenberg. It is some Pawelؠor Jan or Tomek, not one of us. To them, the Pawelٳ and the Jans, I am only their Jew, their little Jew.”
Ellen must have looked so bewildered by this that he felt the need to explain.
“In the old days, every Pole had a little Jew, someone they thought was a little better than the rest of the Jews, someone they could tolerate. Mostly, that was someone they needed, a doctor, a shoemaker, and now, me, their tailor.”
His contempt was so evident, Ellen was glad Marek was not there. He was not one of us, and she knew his presence, at this first meeting, would have made Rafael feel intruded upon. She toyed with the notion that his unavailability might have been Freidl’s work too.
Rafael sighed yet again, his fingers enmeshed in his beard. “I am an old man. I was given my life to live to an old age. This is a blessing. And to have such a guest as you, this is proof that life can still surprise, and in surprise, there is hope, even now, when death sits on my nose and makes me a fool. When I pray, I hear God laugh. And I thank God for Freidl, that she did not leave me, that she would not leave me, even when I failed her. She wanted a memorial. She wanted me to find the other half of her stone, the bottom half. She told me where it was, in the cemetery, facedown. They made there a path from the stones so no one should know it was a cemetery. Then, after the war, they had a building project. They came for the stones and took them to town. Freidl’s was under so many others, I could not get it for her. She begged me. But alone, a man could not lift such weights without being found out. They took her stone and used it to support the pavement. I knew where it was, but I could not get it. Then a farmer goes over there, Wladek Glٯwacki is his name, and it is gone. Just like that. This is where things stand now. He has the stone. I cannot get it. And Freidl is making me heartbroken from this. What can I do? I put pebbles at her grave, to mark her place. But I cannot do more. I do not have the strength to build her a memorial, and it is not a memorial that will return her to her grave.”
Ellen listened to him, realizing he was reciting what went on in his head every day, all day, for years and years. She began to understand his refusal to quit Zokof. If he left, he would be turning his back on his responsibility to Freidl, which he alone had borne all these years. If he did not find a way to let her rest, if he died before achieving this, she would be left to an uncertain fate, for there was no one else to take up her cause.
“What does she need, Rafael?”
“Prayer,” he said simply. “And I know it is the Leibers’ prayers she needs more than mine. She came from death for Itzik, and no one but him or his descendants can return her there, to show God that she did good by defying the law of death.”
32
THEY SAT SILENTLY AT THE TABLE. ELLEN RAN HER FOREFINGER around the rim of her tea glass. “She wants me to pray for her?”
A floorboard creaked. Another car drove by. “Do you pray?” Rafael asked. He didn’t wait for her to respond. “You think it is nonsense to pray, yeh? Don’t deny it. The face tells the secret.”
Ellen opened her mouth, hoping to finesse an answer that would suit them both. “I don’t know if it’s nonsense. I just have never understood it. If I don’t believe in God, how can I pray for Freidl?”
He didn’t answer.
She frowned, not knowing how to explain herself adequately to him. How could she possibly impart the level of hostility toward faith with which she had been raised? “My grandfather always said God is for primitives.” She looked at him nervously. When he merely nodded, she thought him gracious. “When I first came to Kraków, I went to Wawel Cathedral and watched people pray. The Catholics don’t pray like Jews, but I couldn’t help wondering how people don’t feel idiotic, shutting off their reason and asking God for favors. I don’t understand what they’re doing.”
Rafael stroked his beard. He seemed to be listening very closely to what she had to say.
When she paused, he nodded his head. Encouraged, she wrapped a tendril of her hair around her finger and twisted it slowly, nervous about saying these things out loud for the first time. “You know, when I was little, I used to be very curious about heaven. One of my friends told me prayers went there. But my parents and my grandfather convinced me there is no such place. There is no God, and there’s nothing out there at the end of the universe.”
Rafael laughed. “What is so interesting to you about heaven? God, you think, lives in a nice house up there? What does it matter? The end of the universe!” He laughed again. But when he saw that she was not laughing with him, he stopped. “When the Baal Shem, of blessed memory, was in the hour of his death, he said, ‘Now I understand the reason I was created.’ You see?” He pointed meaningfully to the earth. “We are to rejoice in life here and live mindful of God’s judgment of our deeds.”
“I wouldn’t have a problem with the ‘rejoice in life’ part,” Ellen said. “Though after seeing this town, I don’t know how you do it. It’s the God part that I get stuck on.”
He looked toward the window.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, not wanting to insult him in any way. “A lot of people I respect believe in God. And to me, believing only in science seems just as primitive. One tracked, you know? Who knows, maybe the universe is expanding because it’s reaching for heaven? But why pray? That’s what doesn’t make sense to me.”
Rafael turned back to her and smiled. “And my knowing that you dreamed about Freidl, this makes sense? But you don’t deny it’s true.”
She could not argue.
“And God? God makes no sense to you because you were not trained to recognize Him, to see the hand that moves behind all things in the world. For you, it is easier not to believe. But if we turn our backs to God and not our faces, it does not mean He is not there.”
“Like evil,” she said.
“Like evil.” He nodded. “Into the darkness God brought light, but still, there is darkness.”
She felt relieved and a little excited by a certain comfortable solidity to his argument. “You have no idea how ignorant I am,” she said, embarrassed somehow that she didn’t know more about Judaism. “One year, when I was about thirteen, I decided to observe Yom Kippur. At that age, fasting seemed like an interesting idea. You may think this is funny, but I didn’t know anything about Yom Kippur except that religious Jews fast on that day. No one told me that I was supposed to be in a synagogue. My parents took me downtown to the aquarium.”
“Tsk.” Rafael shook his head.
“It was really crowded and hot inside, and I fainted in the middle of a dark hall lined with these huge gray fish.” She sighed. “I can still remember the fish. My parents picked me up off the floor, got me outside, and stuck a sandwich in my mouth. That was the end of my religious experience.”
It surprised her that again he laughed.
“Your parents were afraid you would become a frummeh—an observant Jew—if you knew what is Yom Kippur?”
“Maybe so,” she said, realizing she recognized the word frum from her dream of Freidl. She saw herself dressed up in a wig and a long denim skirt with sneakers, like the Orthodox women in New York, and she too had to laugh.
Rafael looked at her. “You knew to fast on Yom Kippur.
That is something. A memory that remained, yes? It would have been better if your parents knew what they didn’t believe in before they taught you not to believe.”
She screwed up her face in puzzlement.
“In Jewish we say, Ersht lern zikh, un dan lernen ondere—first learn, then teach. That is what I would have told them.”
“Yeah,” she said, loving that he was speaking to her in her grandpa’s language, the mamaloshen, even if she hardly understood a word. “So, a question,” she said. “How does my being able to pray for Freidl make any difference for her?”
He studied her. “Prayer brought our five souls together.” He held up the five fingers of his hand and counted off. “Your grandfather Itzik prayed for Freidl to protect him. Freidl prayed for me that I should survive the Annihilation and help her rest. I prayed for Nathan to find me, and he prayed for the Leibers at Freidl’s grave.” He looked at her. “We pray to console ourselves, the living and the dead. And you must pray for Freidl’s resting place to be cleared of the stones of Lamentations.”
“Lamentations!” Ellen cried. “When I left for Poland, my father told me to read that for you. He said it’s pure poetry.”
“Then read and you will understand about the stones.” He seemed satisfied with her. With some difficulty, he stood up and walked, in his labored fashion, to a hulking dark wooden wardrobe along the street side of the room. He opened the doors and slid open a drawer, removing a yellowed envelope. Returning to the table, he handed it to Ellen and sat down.
“When your father was here, I told him this photograph was stolen from my coat on my way home to Zokof. Yesterday, a man came to my door. A Pole. He tells me he broke down a wall in his house a few years ago, to make a new room. In the wall he found this. He asked if I wanted it because his house used to belong to a Jewish family, and he thought maybe I knew the people in the picture. They did that, during the war, you understand? Jewish people hid their photographs in the walls. Or they buried them, like the books, for after. Or they gave them to Polish neighbors, for safety.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 29