This surprised her, but I saw she was glad I thought her dancing was important. “Dance is movement from the soul,” she said. “It’s like your tunes, in a way, except the dancer sings through her body.”
Such an unusual girl. I put my fingers to my lips, as if the tune of a dance might be there. “What does it say, your dance?” I asked her.
She dropped her head. “Nothing, yet.”
I was disappointed for us both. I tried to encourage her. I asked, “What is this dance for?”
She liked that. “Sometimes I make dances about the beauty of the movement,” she said, “like a beautiful tune. Sometimes I tell a story, like a song, or I try to make a point about something.”
She saw I did not understand this entirely. She said I was like her grandma Sadie. “When I tell my grandma Sadie about my work,” she said, “she pats me on the head and says, ‘That’s wonderful, my darling, you should enjoy your life.’”
I did not want to be like her grandma Sadie. I asked, “With what are you making a point?”
This only seemed to upset her. “I don’t know yet what I’m trying to say. The director wants me to have a point of view, a cry of passion. I want to use your tune, but I don’t know how yet. I don’t know enough.”
She was getting frantic, this even I could see. I put my arm around her shoulder and tried to draw her close. I had never done such a thing to anyone in life. I knew she could not feel the shape of my hand, or my arm around her back. Still, maybe she could feel something from me, maybe I would send up the smell of pines in the forest, or grass, to reassure her. I told her, “The Hassidim say it is a great blessing to have a soul that dances.”
But I felt I should tell her also the truth. “Part of your soul, Elleneh, stays in the ground, away from the light, like Itzik’s,” I said. “The night he came by me, I knew this was a soul that needed to be cooked into a cholent, to let go of its flavor. But it seems he did not cook.”
Fear and hope together gathered on her sweet face. “Listen to me,” I said. “You come from a beautiful people. Without your Jewish soul this dance, what you call it, will not have that flavor. From you will only come pareve. No tam, you understand me? No taste.”
She pulled away from me. “I’m not a Jewish dancer,” she said. “I don’t have to be limited to that. I’m just having a problem with this piece, with the music. I don’t know enough about it. But it’s not who I am.”
I pulled away from her too. I told her, “I would have given so much for a taste of such freedom as you have. The holy books lie open before you, and you say it’s not who you are, that you don’t want to be limited to have to read them? This is how the daughter of a scholar talks?”
This only made her angry.
“I don’t want what my father wants,” she said. Then the tears came because she had spoken of him as if he were still alive. “What I want isn’t in books,” she insisted. “What I want is in the body.”
I was gentle with her. I knew what it was to be a father’s daughter with her own ideas. “You told me you don’t know what you want to say in your dance,” I reminded her. I lifted the lantern. Sparks flew out of it into the trees.
She stared in wonder.
“Listen to me,” I said. “A little Torah now could help.”
“Torah? What would the Torah do for me?”
I thought, did I really have to explain this? “You want something more the Torah should do for you?” I said. “This is the book from God, His prayer to His people! This is His people’s prayers to Him, asking, What we should expect from each other?”
I had spoken too harshly. She looked confused, heartbroken. “I’m sorry, Freidl,” she said to me. “I just don’t know the Torah any more than I know how to pray.”
I was ashamed for us both. I was not a good teacher. “Shah, shah,” I comforted. “Listen. Tonight, I want you should read Torah as a Jew reads, as a Jew prays, with an open heart and a mind full of doubt. Try, Elleneh. For me, try.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you,” she said to me.
Such a lovely girl, such a good heart. I could not help wondering, was this how it was to have the pleasure of your own child? She picked up her father’s Tanakh. We were standing now by a tall lamp, along a forest path. I looked at her book’s blue cover. It said, “Tanakh, The Jewish Bible,” for the wholly uneducated, I supposed. I began to laugh, God knows why. I said, “Come sit by me, my shayna, and open to the book of Exodus. This is where the story of Passover is told, what we retell every year at the Seder table, yes?”
She nodded and gave me a hopeful smile.
“Turn the pages and I will tell you where to begin, in the ‘Song of the Sea,’ as we call it.”
“Song of the Sea. I like that phrase,” she said, happy like a child.
She opened the book to Exodus, pressed down on the stiff new binding, and turned about twenty pages.
“Read to me,” I said.
“‘Thus the Lord delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians.’”
“No, after,” I prompted her.
“You know this by heart?” She seemed amazed at such a thing.
“Naturally,” I said.
“Then tell me which page it’s on.”
“Page?” I pretended to take offense. “Not by us, pages. Such a thing maybe you find in a goyish book.”
I was making jokes. And now she understood me. We had a laugh.
I waited just until I saw her find it, then I left.
Sometime later, Ellen awoke. She remembered dreaming that the bells of Saint Mary’s had begun to peal unbearably loudly, the notes of the hejnalؠencircling her like a hundred taunting Christian bullies. She remembered putting her hands to her ears to shut out the cacophony.
“A choleria on them,” Freidl had said, and in the dream the bells had gone silent. The rest of her memory of what she and Freidl had said or done came to her only in disjointed pieces. They had talked, yes, but it all came apart when she tried to remember the specifics. Something about getting stronger, something about being a strong Jew. What she had managed to retain most were the dream’s images. A fish with a hook in its mouth, a little girl, Hindeleh—yes, that was her name—with a red ribbon in her hair, Ellen’s hair. It was all upsetting and exhilarating at the same time. The sun had begun to cast a dull light over the room. She closed her eyes and slowly became aware that her hands lay outside the covers, holding an open book. A prickly sensation swept across her back, down her arms to her fingers. She was certain she had not been reading when she had fallen asleep.
Sitting up, she stared at the Tanakh on her lap, amazed at having awoken to a tangible remnant of the dream she had been having. What was she to make of the fact that she knew the book was opened to a passage she had found for Freidl. Then Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her in dance with timbrels. And Miriam chanted for them: “Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously;—Horse and driver He has hurled into the sea.”
She reread the verse six or seven times, curious at Freidl’s choice. She liked the timbrels. But she felt chilled by the phrase horse and driver.
36
FOR DAYS AFTER HER DREAM OF FREIDL, ELLEN WORKED ON HER dance piece from early morning until late at night. She established that it would begin with the sound of timbrels, a call to the audience. She bought a tambourine and tapped out rhythms in the studio as she tried to develop movement sequences. She reread Freidl’s Exodus passage so often, she knew it by heart.
Baruch ata Adonai, she repeated at various intervals, exhausting her vocabulary of Hebrew prayer. Alone in the studio, it sounded to her like a voodoo incantation. She felt slightly embarrassed and fraudulent about making an appeal to a God with whom she had never before conversed. But she was determined to attempt the language of prayer and to overcome that helpless feeling she had retained from the encounter with Genia’s Jewish joke.
She began another ritual, humming
the “For-a-GirlTune.”
Marek called from the Ariel Café.
“Is this Ellen, from America?” he asked.
“You have an Ellen from somewhere else too?”
He laughed. “I am glad you think I am a Casanova. Are you free tomorrow afternoon? I was thinking we could meet at the Starmach Gallery. It is very near your hotel, on Rynek Główny.”
“What’s there?” she asked, not really caring. She wanted to see him.
“I have been thinking, this gallery is something you will like to see. You’ve heard of Andrzej Starmach, the art historian?”
“No,” she admitted, wondering if she should have heard of him.
“He shows work by the Kraków Group—Tadeusz Kantor, Jonasz Stern, Maria Jarema. You know these artists?”
She didn’t, although she did notice that Kantor and Stern were both Jewish names. This sudden hyper-Jewish consciousness about things annoyed her, and she scolded herself for being provincial. “What kind of art do they do?”
There was a short silence on the line. “I do not really know how to explain,” he said. “This is something very important in Poland. The Kraków Group were the great modern Polish artists before the war, and after. They refused to make art in the style of socialist realism. You’ve heard of this?”
“Of course,” she said, hoping to combat the impression that she didn’t know anything about art in Eastern Europe.
“And also, Tadeusz Kantor made a special kind of avant-garde theater. Cricot Two, it was called.” He added this tentatively, as if he thought he should not impose more information without a further sign of interest from Ellen.
“Sounds great,” she said. “If you give me the address, I can meet you at five.”
When Ellen saw the paintings at the Starmach Gallery, she knew she had been invited to another Poland. They were huge, fiercely colorful, and full of ideas. She was especially intrigued with a painting by someone who was not of the Kraków Group, a young artist, Marek said. His canvas was dominated by the black back of an armed policeman facing a blue, decapitated man. The man’s head was attached to his lapel with a dragon-shaped pin. His upturned red lips suggested either foolishness or defiance. The painting elicited sympathy for the blue man, and Ellen realized that he probably represented the artists of Poland under communism. She thought of Pronaszko. “I like this one,” she told Marek. “It’s a very good painting.”
He smiled. “Yes. Very good.” He put his arm around her and played, tentatively, with the sheer crimson scarf she had draped over her shoulder.
“What does the dragon mean?” she asked, brushing her hand lightly over his.
He tilted his head toward her, caressing her shoulder as he spoke. “To me, it is the mythical dragon of Kraków, who is under us always. He is the symbol of our city.”
With a cryptic smile, he took her hand and pulled her out the door, into the thick pedestrian traffic on the square, where they walked, arm in arm, around the Cloth Hall, scattering gatherings of birds.
They headed down Floriaska Street, toward Florian’s Gate, stopping at a Café for a small dinner of dumplings and salad. Marek charmed Ellen with his talk of Polish art and Polish film and Polish music and festivals, the rich underground life of his country. He mentioned a performance piece he had seen. “It continued for days,” he said. “We followed the singers and the actors from one setting to another, from an apartment to Kociuszko’s Mound to a jazz club to more apartments, and even to LOT, the Polish airlines office. It was something great. The performers and the audience were one living part of this big experience, together. It was very Polish, something for the soul,” he said, drumming his chest. “It reminded me, exactly, of the Passion plays in Kalwaria during Holy Week. I remember this from when I was a child and I went with my family. Kalwaria is close to Kraków, a very holy place in Poland. It is the tradition for the local people there, and the monks, to act out the last days of Christ’s life. They go, in a procession, from one chapel to the next; there are more than twenty chapels, I think, and at each one they have a sermon. For these two days, Thursday and Friday, people come from all over Poland. They are part of the play too. Everyone goes together. When you are living the story like that, it is so real. You believe the suffering of Christ. You see it!” He paused, as he seemed to realize that Ellen might not share his sense of wonder and delight about such an event.
As for Ellen, she could not help asking herself the very question her mother had put to her: What do you know about this boy? Until that moment she had not feared discovering the distance between them. But now she saw the rootedness of his Catholicism, the superficiality of his connection to Jewishness, saw that he was not nearly as close as she’d chosen to think he was.
He took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Of course, most of the reason my family went to these performances, I think, is because it was during the communist time and we could only show that we were Poles by being Catholic. Today, I think, maybe only the country people or the old go to these plays. Or tourists.” He cocked his head and grinned. “But I am talking too much like a crazy Pole. You must tell me about your work. That is what I want to hear.”
She smiled weakly, took his hand, and caressed his smooth skin with her thumb, choosing, for this moment, to believe in his basic goodness. “Let’s walk through the Planty Gardens,” she said. “You can show me your favorite piece of kitschy art at Florian’s Gate on the way.”
“It’s terrible stuff, what they have there, isn’t it?”
“It ain’t the Starmach Gallery.”
Thus, in each other’s good graces, they strolled through the neighborhood and around the circular brick battlements of the medieval Barbican. “Let’s sit,” Ellen suggested, pointing to a bench in the Planty.
Several pigeons waddled by, cooing and pecking sharply at the grass.
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my dance piece,” she said. “The thing is, I’d like you and your group to do the music for me.”
Marek’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “What music?”
“What else? The ‘For-a-GirlTune.’”
His gave her a reserved smile. “What will be the idea of your dance?”
She opened her purse and took out the oversized envelope Rafael had given her. “I think it will be something about this.” She slid out the photograph of her grandfather and Hillel. “This was taken in Warsaw in 1906.”
Marek edged closer to look.
She pointed to the seated figure. “That’s my grandfather,” she said. “He was fourteen. This is just before he left Poland.”
Marek nodded.
She pointed at the young man standing with his hand on her grandfather’s shoulder. “And this is Hillel. He was a musician, like you.” She smiled at him. “Handsome like you too.”
Marek screwed up his face. “He is better-looking.”
“Actually, he reminds me of you,” she said shyly. She had noticed the resemblance the moment Rafael had handed her the photograph. But only now she realized that it was not so much in the similarity of the two men’s long hair and thin frames, but in a certain sensual wistfulness they shared. She put her hand on his. “When my grandfather arrived in Warsaw from Zokof, Hillel took him under his wing and arranged his ticket to America.”
“Where did you get this photograph?”
“Rafael gave it to me. I thought you’d be interested in it because Hillel learned the ‘For-a-GirlTune’ from my grandfather.”
Marek took the photograph from her and studied it more carefully. “Where did your grandfather hear the tune?”
Ellen’s heart beat rapidly. She wasn’t sure how to navigate her answer. “Rafael says it came from a woman in Zokof named Freidl.” She averted her eyes, hoping he wouldn’t ask for more particulars.
“You found where it came from? And you did not tell me first thing? You are a very bad girl.” Marek wagged his finger at her.
She could see he was only partly joking. “When we go to Zo
kof, you can ask Rafael about it,” she said appealingly.
“Yes, that will be good.”
They looked at the pigeons.
“You like history,” she said. “Do you believe it leaves ghosts?” She half hoped he would take her question in jest so that she would not have to figure out a way to explain Freidl quite yet.
He shrugged. “I like to make fun that now the communists are gone, the churches that were full for Solidarity are almost empty, because now we have our freedom. But you know we Poles are mostly Catholics, ninety percent of us, or more. We come into life hearing of the Holy Ghost. So I suppose, yes, it is understandable if we, if I, believe in ghosts.” He glanced nervously at her, as if he wasn’t sure how she would take this. “I think our ghosts are everywhere, all the time,” he said with more confidence. “The past does not leave us. And we do not leave the past.”
“Like the dragon of Kraków,” she said.
“Like the dragon.” He smiled. “But we cannot worry always about dragons. We must kiss beautiful girls too.” And he did. “Invite me to your hotel, Harvest Moon Girl,” he said.
She was surprised at his directness, but not offended. “Follow me,” she said confidently.
Evening was upon them. They walked back along the Planty to her hotel, holding hands, sharing short kisses, in the way of new lovers.
Side by side, they climbed the grand staircase of the Palace Hotel. At her door, he rubbed the back of her neck as she retrieved the room key from her purse.
When they were inside the vestibule, he took her hand and kissed it. She brushed back the bolt of wavy hair that had fallen over his face and led him into the room. With only a cursory look around, he slid sideways onto her bed, his long legs stretched in front of him, his neck angled against the headboard. They looked at each other. Ellen glanced at the empty place beside him and put down her purse.
“I love your eyes,” she said, turning on the bed light in the darkening room. She took off her crimson scarf and draped it over the light, creating a pinkish glow. “You have the warmest eyes in Poland.” She was immediately sorry she had said this, as it reminded her of the cold eyes she had seen in Zokof, and of her father’s warnings. But she resisted the urge to retreat, and lay down on the bed beside him.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 32