34
ELLEN WAS AT THE STUDIO THE NEXT MORNING AN HOUR BEFORE the dancers arrived. She rolled down the waistband of her black nylon sweatpants, faced the mirrored wall, and fastened on her Walkman. The “For-a-GirlTune” began slowly and quietly, like a shy lover entering an unfamiliar bed. Playing it in the studio lent it a forbidden quality. She rolled her shoulder, extended an arm, and followed the tune’s slow opening, looking for dance phrases to wrap around its beat. Then she sat down with a bottle of water and listened to the tape again, eyes closed, her head leaning against the mirror. She realized she really wasn’t sure what the tune meant, what she might want to say with it. A warm breeze blew the back of her neck, startling her because it felt so like a breath. She shrugged off the sensation, turned off the tape, and began to make choreographic notes. Looking at the movement on paper, she was reminded of Pronaszko’s warning not to make movement just for movement’s sake.
The birds cooed at the windowsill. Step back, she told herself. Get moving with the company. Maybe they’ll have some useful ideas. She didn’t usually work this way. Usually, she choreographed a piece with the music and taught it to dancers, or she worked it out directly on their bodies, incorporating their individual styles into the music as they went along.
Pronaszko arrived just as she was returning the tape to her backpack.
“I’d like some time with the dancers today,” she said. She was tempted to play the “For-a-GirlTune” for him, just to see how he would react to it. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Like new love, it was too delicate to share yet.
With his usual detached good humor, Pronaszko told her, “Whatever you need.”
When the dancers were assembled, he took them through a warm up. Then he straddled a backward facing chair and fisted his hands under his chin. “Ellen has some work for us,” he said in English.
She dumped out her bag of tapes and came to the front of the room. “Let’s do some contact improvisation,” she said. “Approach someone. Feel your hips. Get down. Get earthy.” She threw a Zap Mama tape in and turned up the volume on the boom box. For forty-five minutes she pushed the dancers hard to move in ways that were clearly uncomfortable for them. She had them try hip-hop and jazz moves, samba, anything she could think of to pull them away from their tendency to move with stiff spines and turned-out walks.
The results were mixed. At best, they took her instruction as sanction for them to dance the way they did in clubs. At worst, they threw away their technique altogether and flopped about looking pained and awkward.
Tomek, Joanna, and Henryk milled shyly against the long dirty windows and nodded to some Ziggy Marley music. Midsong, they stepped forward to the center of the sun-striped floor, looked to one another for support, and began to bounce alternate shoulders with one another as if on a trampoline.
There’s a start, Ellen thought. If nothing else, she had the sense that they were finally connecting with what she was asking them to do. When class ended, quite a few of the dancers called to her a good-natured “Get down!” in thick Polish accents as they left the studio.
Pronaszko gave her a short, approving nod and slipped out the door. She was about to ask him to wait for her, when Jacek popped his head from behind the changing screen. “We are going for a coffee and something to eat. Will you come with us?”
“I’d love to,” she said, delighted to be asked.
“That was very good music.” He smiled. “We will wait for you.”
And indeed, when she opened the studio door, she found Jacek, Henryk, and Genia smoking on the landing.
“What about Andrzej?” she asked Jacek. It worried her that she might not be able to communicate without his translations.
Jacek looked at his watch. “Oh, I think now he is with that German boy he met at the Czartoryski Museum. He stands at the paintings of naked men and talks to the foreign visitors. He knows who he is looking for.”
Henryk and Genia gave each other knowing looks.
For Ellen, this was the first hint that perhaps Andrzej was not the beloved leader she’d taken him for, that his constant peddling of himself might annoy them as much as it did her. It was a relief. So was hearing these three speak English.
The little group descended the marble stairs single file, past the nearly toothless cleaning woman whose chatter Ellen could not understand at all. They followed Jacek down to the street. The three Poles jostled one another good naturedly on the narrow sidewalk. Ellen smiled. Henryk whistled.
They stopped at an unmarked door, behind which a steep, uneven stone stairway led them down to a dark, fairly small, but beautiful cellar Café with arched brick walls. The place was packed with students and afloat in cigarette smoke. Ellen’s group settled at a corner table lit with candles. They ordered coffee.
“You are fortunate we do not speak English like Maria speaks Polish,” Henryk said.
“Who’s Maria?” Ellen asked.
He puckered his mouth and did a perfect imitation of the cleaning woman.
She wouldn’t have guessed that Maria was unintelligible to them too. She laughed, feeling at ease at last. “You all speak English so well,” she said. “Why do we need Andrzej as a translator?”
They looked at one another. Genia giggled. “Our English is not so good,” she said, drawing in her chin coquettishly.
They all nodded in agreement and drank their gritty, Polish-style coffee.
Ellen turned to Genia. “Are you all from different parts of the country?”
Genia tipped back her head delicately and smiled, close lipped. “I think so, yes. Jacek is from Lower Silesia, near Wrocl١w. Henryk is from near Lٯmz¥a. I am from near Gdańsk.”
Ellen remembered that Pronaszko said they were from small towns. “Everyone is from near somewhere then?”
“Except Andrzej,” Genia said. “Of course, he is from Warsaw.”
The dancers all laughed at this.
“He seems like a big-city boy,” Ellen said gravely, hoping she had gotten the joke.
“Oh, yes,” Genia said, opening her eyes wide and nodding agreeably. “He likes boys very much.”
They all laughed again, Ellen less comfortably. She was unused to hearing such homophobia among dancers.
“Hey, when did those guys start coming in here?” Jacek said, nodding in the direction of two blue-uniformed men.
“Are those policemen?” Ellen asked him, wondering if she should be concerned.
“I am not sure. There are only two of them.”
Ellen didn’t understand why the Poles thought this funny.
Henryk glanced at the policemen and leaned toward her, his eyes bright with mischief. “It is an old joke. Why do policemen always go in threes?”
“Why?” Ellen said.
“One reads, one writes, and one guards these two intellectuals.”
Ellen laughed, so he followed up with half a dozen more stupid policemen jokes, punctuated by Genia’s stilted but helpful explanations. When he paused to light up yet another cigarette, Genia raised herself in her chair, her face fairly aglow. In her little-girl voice, she asked, “How do you take census in Polish village?”
“How?” they said in unison.
“You roll a złoty down the street, you count the legs, divide this by two, and subtract one for the dirty little yd who steals it.”
Ellen felt as if the room had just sunk under water. The ambient sounds became distorted, and everything seemed to float. She stared at the faces of the happy dancers, looking for clues to how they could continue to smile after what they had just heard. Pan Bergson ten yd? she heard the woman in Zokof ask again.
She pushed back her chair and stood slowly, uncertain of her balance. “I have to go,” she said, throwing a handful of zlotys on the table. “I forgot, I have an appointment.”
The Poles seemed somewhat taken aback, but they nodded understandingly and said good-bye.
Ellen zigzagged her way between the tables and scrambled up the perilous
stairway two steps at a time. Once outside, she took off down the street, her distress increasingly fired by adrenaline. Idiots. She began to mutter, not caring about the looks she got from passersby. “Fuck them. I should have told them a Polish joke. I should have said most Americans only know Poles by jokes. Like hey, Jacek, what’s a Polish firing squad? A circle. Ha! Oh, not laughing? You don’t think Poles are stupid? Does that make you feel like the dirty little Jew?” She was practically running now, enfolded in her manic, but strangely seductive, anger. By the time she arrived at her hotel room, she was out of breath.
The Tanakh still lay on her night table. She ran her hand tentatively down its spine, wondering what part of this book gave the world the idea that a Jew is a cartoon, dirty and little. She pulled the book protectively to her chest, physically pained by Jacek, Henryk, and Genia’s betrayal. She’d refused to believe they weren’t as modern as they dressed. Who in her generation would ever think like that, much less say things like they did?
A couple of curls had come loose from her topknot, and she twirled them around her finger. If only she’d done something, made a point. Now she knew she would never again feel entirely at ease with them.
She pulled the cassette of the “For-a-GirlTune” from her dance bag and turned it over in her hand. If she played it for them now, it would require explanation. She would have to protect it from their ideas about Jews. How would she tell them why she had chosen it? Because she would have to explain it, even if this was an unusual thing for a choreographer to do.
She rose from the bed and made circles on the floor with her toe, remembering her unsatisfying experiments with the music that morning. This could be another Adam Mickiewicz debacle, she realized. If she faked it, playing with material she knew nothing about, they’d know. She felt like an adoptive mother, not quite knowing how, or whether, she had the right to claim a baby she didn’t know how to handle. She felt helplessly inadequate.
The wind blew through the open window, flaring one of the long curtain sheers like a woman’s skirt. She pressed the cassette tape to her lips and inhaled.
I really love this music, she thought. She exhaled. The curtain fluttered to her face like a veil, and she rubbed it reassuringly against her cheek.
35
THAT NIGHT, ELLEN DREAMED FREIDL WAS STANDING AT THE edge of a forest holding a kerosene lantern from which white sparks burst, then flittered up to the trees. Her proud bearing, the noble beauty of her angular face, the large deep-set eyes, the improbably full lips made so powerful an impression that Ellen remembered it even after she awoke in the morning.
“Freidl?” she had said in the dream.
The woman had blinked slowly. She smiled, examined Ellen carefully. “Such curls,” she said. “This color you call copper?”
“You heard me and Marek?”
“I heard.”
But I had not come to talk of her distraction with this boy. I came about the Polish girl, about the cruelty of words. A Jew should not be afflicted by strangers insulting her bloodline. A Jew should be able just to live, to love if she can. Yet have we not seen it time and again, how our God uses hatred to return our lost ones to us, who have become strangers to their own people? Terrible. Terrible. I was sorry for Ellen. She was not a fool, but poor soul, she did not know how to defend herself from these wolves.
The woman put down her lantern and made a circular, dismissive motion with her hand. A strong breeze swept over Ellen’s face, blowing back her hair, reminding her of the breath at her neck that morning. She closed her eyes briefly, and although there was no grass anywhere, she detected its scent. Cut grass, she remembered, piled high behind Freidl in another dream. Cut grass. The scent had wafted in the air around Zokof and had led her to Rafael. “You’ve been with me, haven’t you?” she said.
“We have a saying in Jewish,” I told her. “‘Man plans and God laughs.’” But tonight it is my time to laugh.” I let the shawl fall from my head and reveal the white, luminescent square cloth, tied in knots at its four corners. It floated gently above me. She was shocked, I could see. The handkerchief was her grandfather’s, the one she had sent back to Poland with her father.
I laughed, touched the handkerchief. “I watched over him. He told you this, yes?”
She looked at me in a way I knew something was not right, that he had not told her.
“You watched over my father?”
“Your grandfather,” I corrected. But her tears were for her father.
“I watched over your father too,” I told her. This quieted her.
“My dad showed me your gravestone,” she said. “He told me your father was a famous scholar. He said you were a scholar too.”
I bowed my head that she should not see my disappointment. She did not know of me from Itzik. He had told her nothing. “I was not famous,” I said. “A woman does not get her share from being a scholar. It is said, in the World to Come, her share is to be her husband’s footstool.”
She made a face. “That’s awful,” she said. “Things would have been very different if you had been born in our time.” She looked so certain of this, as if I should envy her. I was not so sure.
“Things would have been different if my husband had been a shayner Yid and I had given him his due,” I told her. “I did not make for him a peaceful home. My father, may he rest in peace, warned me often. ‘Freidl,’ he used to say, ‘if you swim against the stream with your mouth open, you will also swallow hooks. And who wants to marry a girl with hooks in her mouth?’ ‘Papa,’ I told him, ‘if I don’t open my mouth, I will starve.’” I laughed. “For this, he called me Freidl the Mouth.”
Now she laughed.
“Shah.” I hushed her. “My husband also called me Freidl the Mouth. But he said it like a curse.”
In my anger, I stood up, spread open my arms, and showed myself to her, my full breasts, strong limbs, bound in mud-caked white linen. My shadow was immense.
She drew back, frightened.
I had upset her, and this I did not want to do. I hoped to teach her that night, not to frighten her. “We should begin,” I said. “There are things you should know. Your father gave you a ribbon, yes? Bring it to me.”
She seemed surprised I knew about the ribbon, but she went to the Tanakh her father gave her. Between the pages was the ribbon. The red had faded.
I took it from her and held it above her head. “This belonged to your great aunt Hindeleh,” I said. “The night your grandfather ran from Zokof, she gave it to him. It was red then. A ribbon from her hair. Four years old she was, with copper curls, like yours, exactly.”
I could see her anxiety. She asked what happened to Hindeleh. What could I do but tell her the whole story? “They went east, toward Chelm. The poor child died in an orphanage.”
Her chest contracted. “Why an orphanage?” she wanted to know.
“Your great grandmother Sarah, may her name be inscribed, perished on the road to Chelm.”
She took the ribbon from me and placed it on her palm. “My grandfather never told me he had a sister with hair like mine,” she said.
My heart broke for her. “He did not know what became of them,” I told her, though we both knew this was no excuse. “The Leibers became like scattered birds. One by one, I watched them fall from the sky. God would not let me do more.” My grief at this returned to me, sudden and terrible. Worse for seeing it also on her face. “They suffered,” I told her. What could I say? It was the truth.
She reached for me, tried to brush back the loose strands of my gray hair under the white handkerchief that was still floating above my head. The ribbon fluttered upward, back into my hand, and turned red again.
I said, “Thanks God for what I see in your heart. But we are not here tonight to recite Lamentations, Elleneh, or to ask how could this have been.”
“Then why are we here?” she asked.
“To make a strong Jew from a seed,” I told her.
And this girl had the chutzpah to
say she did not know if being a strong Jew was what she needed to be. “In my world being Jewish is just not that important,” she said.
Such narrishkeit. How she inflamed me with these sentiments. But I spoke calmly to her. “A life in the Golden Land is what I made possible for your grandfather,” I said. “Very pleasant. A life of summer. A place to forget that a Jew has to be strong, like a tree. That you should grow roots and branches and have a trunk made tough by the seasons. And why?” I let her wait for the answer, like my father when he wanted me to know he was making an important point. “Why am I here to make a strong Jew from a seed?”
She looked at me.
“So when a Polack makes of you a joke, you do not fall down and begin to die.”
Even in her sleep, my words made their mark. The blood rushed to her face.
But I did not give her peace. I came at her, full of force. I said, “You let them make you afraid. What is that, that you don’t even know where to turn to answer them? At such times as those, you open your Torah, your Talmud, even your Tsene Urene.”
“My what?”
“Gevalt, you never heard of the Yiddish bible for women?”
But she had nerve of her own. She gave me a look. “What good would those books do in my situation today?” she demanded.
I said to her, “Asses bray all the time, Elleneh. So? It is for you to remember the proverb. If you have learning, you will never lose your way.”
There was a hint of understanding in her eyes. This pleased me. “Now,” I said, “what is that turning and jumping I saw you do today? What is this?”
“I’m a dancer,” she said. “The kind of dance I do didn’t exist in your day. It’s like ballet, but not quite.”
“Ballet?” I said. “I never heard such a thing.” It came to me that Miriam danced, so I asked her, “Why do you dance?”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 31