“So this is a photograph from before the war?” Her arms tingled as if she had touched electricity.
He nodded. “I asked my neighbor, why is he bringing it to me now? He said his conscience was bothering him. He meant to give it to me years ago, when he found it, but he forgot.” Rafael shrugged. “Yesterday, something made him take the envelope and bring it to me. Something, yeh? Freidl came to me last night and told me how she scared this Pole into bringing me the photograph for you. She wants you should have it.”
Ellen could barely speak as she began to open the envelope.“Thank you,” she whispered.
Rafael shrugged again.
The photograph was mounted on a card, in the old style. It was very much like the framed one her father had in his study. She pulled it out carefully and saw her grandfather seated in a chair, wearing the same clothes as in her dad’s photograph. But standing beside him, with a protective arm on her grandfather’s shoulder, was a beautiful young man. His long dark hair was combed straight back, startlingly like Marek’s. She loved the jaunty yet elegant way he held his body. It perfectly complemented the defiant look on his face.
“That is Hillel,” Rafael said, pointing to the young man. “He was a musician, a Jew. He played guitar. Freidl wanted I should tell you that to him she sang a niggun—a tune—in his ear. He was a socialist. Still, she thought he looked like a mensch. She sang to him so he would stay with Itzik and watch out for him, which he did, gave him passage to America. Now I will tell you something. Not so long ago, in Kraków, Freidl sang it again. But the tune, you know which one, it is from her. Her prayer for you.”
Ellen felt her face flush. “I know which one,” she said, filled with love and awe of this woman.
The afternoon grew late. Ellen asked to use the bathroom.
“The toilet is in the back. This is an old house,” Rafael said, as if he felt he needed to apologize. “Use the kitchen door.”
It took Ellen a moment to understand that she would have to go outside, to an outhouse that stood at the end of a footpath about thirty feet from the house. The stench of it reached her before she got to the wooden door, and once inside, the fetid smell of urine warned her not to sit. Squatting over the hole, she grabbed a few sheets of the abrasive gray paper he kept there as toilet tissue and peed as quickly as she could. It would soon be dark. She wondered how he managed this at night. Or in the winter snow.
She washed her hands in the kitchen and returned to Rafael in the living room. He had closed his eyes. She would have liked to press him about how Freidl’s tune was a prayer, and if he knew that Marek now played it with his musicians in Kraków, but he seemed so tired. Still, when she told him she would have to leave, his chest contracted ever so slightly, as if her departure caused him physical pain.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Next time, will you show me the cemetery where Freidl is buried?”
He looked up at her with a tenacious tenderness and rose to escort her to the door. “Next time. Yeh.”
She squeezed his arm gently. “I’ll be back.”
“Good bye, shayna maidel,” he said with some difficulty as he watched her tuck the photograph of her grandfather and Hillel into her backpack. “I leave you in Freidl’s good hands, aleha ha sholem—upon her may there be peace.” He walked her to the vestibule and opened the door. “Tell your driver to be careful, yeh?”
She spread her arms to say good bye, and he did not resist her when she enfolded him. He wore so many layers, the demarcation of body and cloth was indistinct. At close range, his clothes gave off the stale odor of dead skin and dust.
She walked back to the main square. Krzysztof sat smoking on a bench next to the war memorial. He greeted her, and they chatted pleasantly on their way back to the car, making liberal use of hand signals, which they continued to do all through their ride back to Kraków. They spoke about the Polish love of mushroom picking, and how the pollution from Nowa Huta was affecting people’s health. At some point, Ellen rearranged her crocheted shawl on her shoulders, and as she did, she caught the distinct smell of Rafael’s musty clothes. It made her very happy to have been able to take it with her.
33
THAT EVENING, MAREK CALLED THE PALACE HOTEL. “ELLEN, we are still in łódź. I’m sorry I could not take you myself to Zokof. Did you find a ride?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I did not know about my group’s engagement. I came to your hotel to tell you, but you were not there and I had to leave. My group, well, we are not as organized as we should be. I don’t see them when we are not working.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ellen said, enjoying his asking her to forgive him almost as much as the sex in his rolled r’s. “It worked out. I spent the day with Rafael. We’ll go there together some other time.”
“Good, good. Any time you like. But if you are not going tomorrow, will you come out with me for dinner? I will be back in Kraków in the afternoon.”
She cupped the phone in her hands, smiling. “Sure. I’d like that a lot. Where do you want to go?”
There was a pause. “Well, you are always in the city. Maybe you would like to see a different kind of place. I know an inn in the forest.”
Ellen didn’t like the sound of this. Too far for a first date, and in one of their recent conversations, her mother had told her to stay away from Polish inns. “Your father told me they’re cement rooms where men go to get drunk,” she’d said.
“Why would we go to an inn instead of a restaurant?” she asked.
“You don’t like an inn?” He seemed confused.
“Is it one room, where people just drink?”
Marek laughed. “Oh, no. Not that kind. How do you know about that?”
“My father told my mother about them, and she told me.”
“Your father went to such places?”
“I think he might have walked into one by mistake.” She could easily imagine him doing this, then backing out like a dog from a skunk’s burrow.
“Don’t worry, you will like this inn,” Marek said. “Very beautiful. They serve meals outside in the garden, or inside. It is very nice inside too. People also come to stay the night.”
When she still hesitated, he added, “Not us, but people.”
Ellen smiled at his nervousness and thought that if Freidl could trust Marek with the “For-a-GirlTune,” she should trust him to take her to dinner. “Okay, tomorrow,” she said.
The following evening, Ellen descended the grand staircase of the Palace Hotel. In her right hand, she held her beaded jean jacket and a small embroidered purse with a golden chain. Halfway down the stairs she saw Marek enter the hotel. In chocolate brown jeans and a close-fitting black shirt, his hair blown back, he looked fantastic.
She slowed her pace, remembering that well bred women kept their heads lifted when they walked down stairs. Lately, she had developed a desire to attend to notions of nineteenth-century etiquette. The architecture at the Palace seemed to require it. So did the strappy metallic heels she was wearing.
Marek’s wide mouth parted into a shy, approving smile when he saw her. “Good evening,” he said.
She liked the even shape of his white teeth as he smiled up at her. Only the silly tuft of red hair below his bottom lip upset the look she liked. “Hi!” she called down to him, and abandoning all pretense at old-world manners, leaped down the remaining stairs, her new amber droplet earrings swinging wildly along the sides of her neck. On the second step from the bottom, she stopped to look at him, his gold earring, his oval face, the wavy flow of his long brushed-back hair.
Unconsciously, she raised her free hand slightly above the curved banister. He took it in his and kissed it. She was surprised by the gesture, and wondered if hand-kissing was as customary a Polish greeting among people her age as it apparently still was with older Poles like Konstantin Pronaszko. Or, she wondered, did Marek mean something more by it?
His dark-brown eyes roved merrily from her face to the softly folded neckline of t
he white chiffon blouse she wore.
She noticed this with pleasure.
He pointed to the door. “My car is down the street,” he said, gallant as a knight.
Together, they walked to his miniature muddy white Fiat Polska. Marek opened the door for her. Ellen eyed the lopsided black upholstery and quickly folded her long legs into the passenger seat, glad she had worn her satin silk slip skirt, cut on the bias to stretch when needed.
They chugged slowly out of Kraków, the Fiat emitting grunts and fumes at every stop. “It can make the trip,” Marek assured her. “And I can fix it if anything breaks down.”
“With those musician’s hands?” she said in mock horror.
He smiled at her.
In the car’s tight proximity, she could feel the heat of his forearm as he shifted gears. He was one of those men, she noticed, whose body was always the right temperature. His hands, with their long rectangular fingertips, cupped the steering wheel in a manner suggesting a graceful and certain lover. She leaned back happily in the hard, uneven seat.
Marek slid a cassette of a Chopin mazurka into the portable tape player and informed her, with a certain pride, that they could play music wherever they went.
She opened his cassette case and was surprised to discover tapes by B.B. King, Robert Johnson, and Rickie Lee Jones. “We seem to have the same taste,” she said.
He sent her a quick sidelong smile.
She watched how his fingers caressed the wheel and decided this was not the time to tell him about her visit with Rafael.
Twenty minutes later, they turned off the highway onto a narrow road that took them through a birch and pine forest. Shortly after, they reached a clearing. In the waning light, people were still seated at small tables in the patio garden of an intricately crafted wooden chalet.
Marek parked, and Ellen put on her jean jacket in the cool pine-scented air. They followed a flower lined stone path to the front entrance of the inn.
“It may surprise you, but this building is new,” he told her. “This is a replica of a traditional wood architecture that was destroyed during the war.” He seemed very proud of the place.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Marek smiled. “I thought you would like it, but you look cold.” He examined the thin fabric of her outfit with concern. “We will sit inside.”
They were seated at a table for two near the open hearth of a lit brick fireplace. The mantel was crowded with brightly colored carved-wood figurines, each with painted red cheeks. The carved women held fish and ducks. Some of them churned butter. The men carried baskets of birds. “Aren’t they wonderful?” she said to Marek.
“Yes, and so is the food.”
“What should I order?”
“Try the bigos,” he suggested. “Very Polish. This is a cabbage stew, with meats and sausage. At home, my mother serves it after church on Sundays. A good bigos takes most of the week to make.”
Ellen could not imagine Marek as a churchgoer, and she didn’t particularly want to try. It only served to underline the differences between them. She had not even begun to try to imagine his family. Perhaps his mother was one of those solid Polish women of indeterminate age, like the ones she’d seen in Zokof carrying grocery sacks, wearing scarves tied under their chins and knee-high stockings with their thick, round-toed shoes. “Where do your parents live?” she asked.
“In Kielce.”
At once, her ears began to burn. She did not want to ask Marek if he knew about the forty two Kielce Jews who’d been killed after the war. Instead, she stared at the hearth fire.
“What do you know about this boy?” her mother had asked her. “A good looking boy, a kind face,” Freidl had said. Ellen glanced at Marek and thought it strange to be connected to Polish people, from Kielce, through their son. Those people seemed so much more foreign to her than he did.
The waiter arrived.
“You know, the bigos sounds a little heavy for me,” she said. “Do they have salads?”
He rolled his eyes playfully. “I forgot. Americans eat grass.”
She thought of Rafael.
He conferred with the waiter. “Maybe you would like to try the wild mushroom salad or tomatoes with onion?”
“Wild mushrooms,” she said, in the interest of avoiding onion breath.
“For the main course, they have fried pork cutlet or a stuffed cabbage. Also duck with apples inside. That is very good.”
“I’ll have the duck,” she said.
“And I’ll have bigos and a beetroot soup. You can taste mine.” He winked at her.
Ellen smiled again, trying to banish the whole business of Kielce from her mind. It was ridiculous to dwell on it. She didn’t know anything about his family. Maybe they didn’t even live there after the war. “This inn isn’t at all the Poland my father described to me,” she said.
“Your father should have seen it with a Pole. And you, you have been almost nowhere. Do you like to go hiking?”
Ellen told him that she did.
“Then you must see Zakopane, in the Tatra Mountains. It’s not far from Kraków. I could show it to you. This is the best place in Poland for hiking. There are trails through the valleys and the granite peaks, to the Jaskinia Mroźna, the Frosty Cave. My family used to go camping there on holiday in the summer.”
The fire lit his smiling face with gold and reddish hues, and she thought him beautiful. A langer loksh, Freidl had called him. She felt at ease with him again.
“Zakopane is the most beautiful place anywhere,” he said.
Ellen shook her head, teasing him. “Couldn’t be. The Adirondacks, where we used to go for the summer, is the most beautiful place. There are mountains and lakes and the most orange salamanders on earth. I ought to know,” she whispered conspiratorially. “When I was a little girl, I used to fill paper cups with them and carry them down the mountains. The funny part was, when I fell asleep on my father’s shoulders, they were always gone when I woke up.”
Marek chuckled. “You dropped them?”
“No, I think my father took pity on them and let them go. Otherwise, I would have tried to make a home for them.”
“A house for salamanders?” Marek laughed. “There is a song I knew when I was little, about a boy who catches lizards until one night he wakes up in the house of the king lizard. They serve him for dinner, of course.”
She made a face.
“It is not a nice story,” he said, laughing. “The melody is not very good either.”
“But it kept you from torturing lizards, I bet.”
“No, my mother did that. She is like your father.”
Ellen tilted her head slightly, relieved at this information about his mother. She smiled at him again. They laughed some more. He slid his hand across the table and took hers. “I’m glad we met,” he said.
When they returned to the hotel, Marek turned off the motor. He pulled a cassette tape from his jacket in the backseat and handed it to her. “In łódź, my group made a special recording for you of that song you liked.”
She took the tape from him, overwhelmed that he had done this for her. Yet she was still reluctant to tell him how the tune had come to him.
His smooth fingers closed over hers, warm and insistent. Instinctively the two of them looked down at their hands, locked together over the gearshift. She peeked up at him and found him doing the same. They smiled briefly at each other, lips closed shyly. Then he reached over and opened her door for her.
They walked the short distance to the hotel’s entrance. He held her elbow protectively. A current rippled up and down her arm. She turned to say good bye. His hand slipped comfortably around her back.
“This has been an incredible evening,” she said, praying for composure.
He cocked his head and returned her smile. “Do you know your eyes are the same color as your hair? What is that color? The color of the moon in autumn. Not gold.”
It occurred to Ellen that had she been
in Rome and some guy had said this to her, she would have laughed and put him off. “Copper,” she said encouragingly.
“Yes, copper.” His eyes didn’t leave her face.
The pause grew longer. It was clear he wasn’t going to break it. She said, “The copper moon in autumn, we call it a harvest moon.”
His eyes didn’t waver. “So do we.”
She poked him playfully in the chest. “You should see it over the Manhattan skyline.”
“I’d like that, someday.”
He leaned forward and kissed her softly, just next to her mouth. His skin was smooth as it brushed hers, and she felt the pull of his mouth playing on her cheek, the tickle of the tab of hair beneath his lower lip. Straightening, he ran his other hand over the crown of her hair, his eyes and mouth equal parts smile. “Good night, Harvest Moon Girl,” he said. “We will see each other soon, I hope?”
She liked the way he didn’t assume anything. “I hope so too,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the mouth before she turned and, under the soft lights of the hotel entrance, skipped up the grand staircase, knowing that his eyes were on her still.
Later, she lay on her bed, eyes closed, afloat in a hopeful desire for him. She listened repeatedly to his “For-a-GirlTune” on her Walkman, reliving every phrase, every glance they’d exchanged all evening, as if watching a fast action film of a blossoming. She knew she was being stupid and juvenile, but she didn’t care.
She rolled over on her side, thinking she had never had a relationship begin so effortlessly, like a clean leap, the secret of whose fluidity is the strength of each partner’s body.
The “For-a-GirlTune” ended. She turned off the tape and fell asleep, content.
I came to her in the night as she slept. I sat by her bed, called her name. But she did not open her eyes as before. She had wrapped herself in her blanket and, even in sleep, had assumed a lover’s posture. What new foolishness had I begun with my envy of the living? Carelessly, I had carried Aaron’s tune with me into the world so that a Pole, even if a mensch of a Pole, had heard it. And now Ellen, my hope for redemption, was enveloping herself in a distracting passion for this boy. Yes, the heart takes what it wants. I always said it. But a union between these two? God forgive me. What kind of legacy was this from what Aaron gave me?
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 30