He smiled, leaned forward, and kissed her. When she didn’t quite respond, he tried again. “Ellen? Is there something wrong with my eyes now? Or with Poland?”
She knew he was trying to be playful, but she said, “It’s Poland.”
His excitement seemed to dim. “It is only that you do not know us yet,” he said. “We are not what those Americans at the Ariel Café think we are.”
She wanted to believe him. With some effort, she allowed herself to again adore the shape of his parted lips.
They kissed again, and their tentative hands began to struggle with his shirt buttons and her fitted skirt. She explored the soft round cushion of brown hair on his chest and the smooth skin of his back. They rolled over each other, testing the sensation of the other’s body. When they rolled too far to the edge, they fell, ungracefully and with a solid thump, onto the carpeted floor, in the open space between the bed and the wall. “Hey!” he said.
Ellen laughed.
Marek reached up and, with a jerk that would have been the envy of any magician, whisked the white brocade spread off the bed. It settled over them like an elegant arched tent, enveloping them in whiteness. Snapping off her bra, he pulled back to look at her. “You have beautiful breasts,” he said, and kissed one.
She wrapped her arms around his back. “Do you know, your body is just the right temperature for me? Just the right warmth.”
He kissed her, adoringly digging his fingers into the ringlets of her hair.
Without shyness, they watched each other work their way out of their remaining clothes, then climbed back under the bedspread. The bed light and the setting sun gave their skin a rosy cast.
Ellen traced the line of Marek’s hip to his groin. “This is the most beautiful part of a man’s body,” she said, “and I don’t even know what it’s called.” She ran her fingers up and down the ridge, watching his sharp breaths. Finally, he grabbed her hand and held it still.
“Stop,” he said. “Look what you are doing to me.” He pressed her hand to his erect penis and pulled her to him.
She too pulled him close, as much for the feel of his warm skin as to lose sight of his fleshy uncircumcised organ, so unlike the mushroom-smooth penis heads with which she was accustomed. She wondered if it would feel different inside her. But Marek was so nimble, and so sweet a lover, it became easy to ignore the foreskin, even after he came and they lay in each other’s arms, dreamy and dumb.
The sun had set. They were in shadows. Marek rolled onto his back.
Ellen took his outstretched hand in hers and kissed it. Its coolness felt good on her overheated palm. “You’re my first,” she said, chuckling.
“What?”
“My first uncircumcised man.”
He remained strangely motionless. “Then, you only go with Jewish men?”
“No, but almost all the guys our age in the States are circumcised. They just do it in the hospital when babies are born.”
“Sweet Mary, Mother of God! No one is circumcised in Poland.”
“Sweet Mary circumcised her boy.”
There was a brief silence between them.
“Does this mean you do not want to be with me again, if I’m not circumcised?” Marek asked cautiously.
She stroked his cheek. “Marek Gruberski, I want to be with you. But if you ever want to make love to me again”—she nipped at the tuft of hair below his lip—“this thing has got to go!”
He laughed with obvious relief, and hugged her to him. “Easier to cut the beard than the foreskin,” he said. “Tomorrow morning, I promise, the thing is gone!”
They kissed each other good night. Ellen rolled over. Marek curled around her.
God forgive me, but I watched them. In my life, I never dreamed people could have relations like this. For me, intimacy between Jew and Christian was already a scandal, but this unholy nakedness! I could not have imagined passion that would pull a man and a woman to the floor, not even with Aaron. Of course, my knowledge of these things had its limits. I had buried desire so deep in my marriage bed, it got lost with the feathers. And if the women of our town whispered of such matters, I had stood too far apart from them to hear. Such familiarity offended me, as my father taught me it should. Not from timidity then, but from pride I had closed myself off from their community. But this night I knew my father had been wrong to advise isolation. I had remained undeveloped in some important way. When the two lovers quieted, I was like a child, understanding little but that I had witnessed something strange and immodest, but touched with a gentleness that opened my heart.
They lay with their arms around each other. The fire of envy and admiration burned in me. Womanliness, with its tenderness, its compassion and patient wisdom, I had denied myself for a seat in a house of study. And what had come of it? A lonely life, a small life, affecting nothing because I had affected no one. I cursed myself for having lived lazy as a drunk in my indifference to life. I scolded myself for having been so proud that the Angel of Death had come easily by me. Why not? For years I made a home for him among my lifeless daily rituals. As it is said, those who do not grow, grow smaller.
I was nearly exhausted from heaping scorn upon myself like dirt on my grave, each shovelful a memory of another sin. Ellen turned away from her lover. On her face I saw her grandfather’s lost expression that had drawn me from my resting place that I might help him find his way. “Be vigilant,” my father had said. “Return her timbrel, and she will make an opening for you to return.” I looked at this girl from the Golden Land and understood. The choice was mine, to enter her life and teach her in the way she should go or to remain outside observing her. To cross this boundary between us was no small thing.
37
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, ELLEN OPENED HER EYES AND saw Freidl rocking back and forth in the wingback chair, a half-smile accentuating her high cheekbones.
“Your langer loksh has a light in him,” Freidl said.
Ellen stared across the room at the bed where she and Marek slept, her nakedness barely covered by the bedspread, his arm draped over her upper thigh. She did not understand how she could be outside her body, yet, vaguely aware that she was dreaming, she was not alarmed.
“Aaron Birnbaum had a light like that.” Freidl nodded approvingly. “And a head for Torah too.”
Ellen didn’t know who Aaron Birnbaum was. As for having a head for Torah, she thought Freidl was chiding her for sleeping with a non-Jew.
“My Aaron had a talent for niggunim, like your langer loksh,” Freidl went on. “For him, the tunes came like fruit from a tree. He had only to pick them.”
“Your Aaron?” Ellen said, intrigued by the woman’s excitement about a man.
Freidl pursed her lips slightly. “You think I was always an old yideneh? When I was a girl in my father’s house, I knew what was love. My Aaron sang to me every day, from the street. His voice was, for me, like the sound of a shofar. I could hear it over all the others. God forgive me, but when Aaron sang, it was like my own Messiah had come, heh!”
Ellen marveled that a love more than a hundred years old could still look so fresh on a woman’s face.
“Sometimes he whistled, like a Pole.”
Ellen looked at her uncertainly.
“Does a Jew whistle? If Aaron whistled, my father would not suspect him. He would think it was just someone in the street.” Freidl clapped her hands to her mouth and muffled a peculiarly lusty giggle.
Ellen realized Freidl was not like her grandma Sadie, a woman so embarrassed to admit any knowledge of or interest in sex that she insisted her children had been conceived while she was asleep.
“You understand,” Freidl said, the buoyant expression fading, “my father, may his name be for a blessing, did not approve of Aaron Birnbaum. Aaron was a Hassid. My father was not. ‘Their faith is backwards,’ Poppa said. ‘The music is for the Jew, not the Jew for the music.’” She lifted her chin proudly. “But, Elleneh, I tell you, as I am here with you tonight, my fathe
r was wrong. In Aaron’s tunes, every one, there is the essence of a prayer, of what it is to stand before God and dare to show Him that deepest feeling, what it is to be a ben Adam—a son of Adam, a human being.”
Ellen thought it strange and magnificent that God would have to depend on human beings to tell Him how it feels to be one of His creations.
Freidl’s lips tightened again. “My father, of course, forbid a union between Aaron and me.” She clenched her hands to her breasts. “But the heart takes what it wants.”
The two women looked at the sleeping Marek. “The ‘For-a-GirlTune’ was Aaron’s, wasn’t it?” Ellen said.
Freidl nodded. “His music was all I had of him who should have been my husband.”
Ellen shrugged slightly. “It would have been different if you had had him for a husband. With a musician, you’d have probably had to go out and work to make ends meet, feed the kids, pay the rent and all that.” To her, this seemed merely obvious.
“But I loved him,” Freidl said meekly.
Ellen saw no point in disillusioning her about a life with Aaron.
Marek murmured something in Polish and rolled onto his stomach. The two women waited until he settled back into sleep.
“Your langer loksh, he reminds me of the other one who loved music, the boy in the photograph, with Itzik,” Freidl said.
“Hillel. Yes, I think so too. Sexy guys,” Ellen said half-jokingly.
Freidl looked away, and Ellen thought the remark’s overtness had offended her. “I’m sorry if I upset you,” she said.
Freidl shrugged again. “Upset?” She seemed distracted. “What I am today, this shape, is not my body. There are times when the light goes out from me altogether and I am afraid that I will be exiled forever from the world.” She sighed. “That is how it has been, from the night your grandfather came by me. But still, these two could be like brothers.” She nodded again, as if trying to comfort herself.
Ellen took this as her moment to ask, “Freidl, what happened that night, when my grandfather came to you?”
Freidl stopped nodding and gave Ellen a serious look. “From the grave I followed Itzik,” she said. “I sang to him. I sang to him the deepest prayer I knew, Aaron’s niggun. He did not hear me. He was that kind of boy. What his eye did not see, his heart did not feel.”
Ellen wondered if her grandfather’s refusal of God arose from the same stubborn literalism that was evident throughout his life. She had always found it so difficult to understand this about him, how a person could be so progressive in his thinking but so unwilling to explore his own imagination, and so resistant in his personal life. He never went to the theater or even to the movies, steadfastly ignoring the pleas of his wife. She remembered once, when at ten or eleven, she had wanted him to join the family for a visit to the Museum of Science. He had dismissed the idea so abruptly it had scared her.
“Still, I prayed,” Freidl continued. “I told myself, God doesn’t always answer us the first time, or the second.” She shrugged. “I prayed when he went by Avrum Kollek’s house, when he said good bye to his family. I prayed for him on the road to Radom, in the station where he bought the ticket, on the train when he fell asleep.”
Ellen watched her closely, so fascinated by this succession of events that she was reluctant to interrupt for details.
“I looked for someone who could help him. In the Warsaw train station, when your grandfather arrived, I was so frantic already, I sang the tune to Hillel.”
“How did you know Hillel heard you?” she asked.
“He asked Itzik about it. Itzik himself he didn’t care about, not in the beginning. It was the tune that kept Hillel. Heh! A socialist begging to hear the tune of a Hassid! He wanted it, in the way a man wants a woman. I made him think it was Itzik humming, when it was me at his ear.” She smiled sadly. “I could see, from the way he moved, like a cat, that Hillel was a man always ready to escape. I had to watch him, to make him want to stay, to take care of Itzik.”
“And he stayed. Not bad for a socialist.” Ellen couldn’t help teasing.
Freidl conceded this with a gracious smile. “A mensch is a mensch. He took care of your grandfather to the end.”
Ellen tried to imagine Hillel and her grandfather as friends. Their pose in the photograph, with Hillel’s hand on her grandfather’s shoulder, suggested friendship, but their expressions revealed little else. “Is that how my grandfather became a socialist, when he met Hillel?” she asked, since this was the one thing she knew they had in common.
“Your grandfather was no socialist when he came by me,” Freidl said tightly. She leaned forward, as if inviting Ellen to join a closed circle of talkers. “When he came to my grave, he wrapped his arms around my stone, my matzevah, and he prayed to Ha Shem, the Almighty.”
Ellen had an image of her grandfather on his knees at Freidl’s grave, and the muscles tightened around her chest.
“Itzik the Faithless One. Ptuh! Like I said, such a joker is God, who would send this angry boy to my stone, as if he were my own child. That He would choose me to save him, a fertile woman gone childless to her grave, a woman restless as I was with regret.”
She raised her open hands. They were filled with blades of grass. “Two handfuls of grass Itzik dropped on my grave.”
Ellen inhaled the unmistakable sweet smell of grass that seemed to accompany Freidl wherever she went.
“That night when Itzik came by me, with grass in his hands, I thought it was a sign,” Freidl said, her voice breaking. “For the first time, I knew what it was to pray with a mother’s heart. You cannot imagine what this was for me. Ruler of the Universe, I said, it is written, ‘Every blade of grass has its own guardian star in the firmament which strikes it and commands it to grow!’ Let a spark be lit in him and let him grow!” Freidl covered her face with her hands, her voice having given out.
Stunned by the depth of Freidl’s passion for a child, her grandfather, Ellen tried to approach her. But Freidl had not finished. She shook the fistfuls of grass at the heavens. “‘Grass!’ he said. I should have known when he kicked it from my grave that he did not mean to pray for me. I should have known that, good as he was, he would not hear me. I was a fool. I thought he meant a prayer for me, that I too should sprout from that place as grass sprouts from the earth. But he meant the grass that made Jan the Peasant fall to his death. I am sorry, but truth is truth.”
“It’s all right,” Ellen said, seeing the pained yet apologetic look on Freidl’s face.
Freidl turned away. “I have asked myself, was it for me, or Itzik, that God answered my prayer that night?” Her voice was barely audible. She looked at Ellen. “His power He gave me, to make a mensch of this boy, your grandfather, who had stood between the wicked and the innocent. And what did I do? I failed him and God both.” Freidl put her hand to her mouth and held back a cry.
“What can I do for you?” Ellen asked her.
Freidl hesitated, then spread her arms. The walls fell away, and she rose into the enormity of a starry sky. Above her head, a white linen shroud floated like a wedding canopy.
Ellen hovered just below, a child peering up at a mother who was trying to teach her something she could not comprehend.
Freidl looked down at her. Her expression was gentle but distressed. With a whooshing sound, she returned to the wingback chair. The walls rejoined. She regarded Ellen expectantly. “Your prayers for mercy are what you can do for me,” she said. “The soul cannot endure forever in such a state as mine. You who hear me must redeem me. Return me to rest with my body in the place Rafael has marked with stones in Zokof cemetery. That is what I ask of you.”
“If I knew how to pray for you, Freidl, for it to be real, you know I would do that for you. But I don’t know how,” Ellen said.
Freidl rocked back and forth, restored to her grandmotherly state. She patted her chest feebly and said, “Make a start, with the open book. You can pretend, as if it is the first day of your school—your cheder. Yo
ur teacher gives you a word from Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav.” She smiled at the name. “Rebbe Nachman, you should know, was a Hassid whose faith even my father admired. Rebbe Nachman said, ‘Pray for an open heart, and in your dance you will attach yourself to God.’” She sat back, apparently satisfied. “Don’t be afraid to tell me a little Torah—a shtickl Torah, as we say.”
Even in her consternation, Ellen smiled at the funny sound of the word shtickl, which made her think again of her grandpa Isaac and how he had also made her laugh.
“You have begun already, with Miriam and the timbrel.”
Ellen thought there was a hint of playfulness in her smile, and something slightly secretive. She wanted Freidl to stay. She wanted to talk to her, to know her more. But the white linen shroud, now lit from within, floated in through the open window. As it drew close, Ellen recognized the pattern on Grandpa Isaac’s handkerchief. She watched, in dumb fascination, as the shroud wound itself around Freidl and swept her into darkness, leaving behind an empty chair.
Ellen suddenly felt the weight of the bedspread on her shoulder and the warmth of Marek’s body next to hers. She inhaled deeply, so grateful to have been returned to her body. As she exhaled, she whispered, “Thank you,” surprised that it was God to whom she spoke.
38
ELLEN AWOKE WITH THE MORNING LIGHT, BENEATH THE WHITE bedspread. The words a shtickl Torah rolled around her head. Marek kissed her neck, and she turned to him. He stretched, surveying her through slit eyes as his arm crept under the sheet. He smiled as he found her lower back and pulled her close.
Aroused by his breath on her skin, she ran her fingertips up and down the length of his torso.
He arranged a handful of her curls with his free hand. “Good morning, beautiful Ellen,” he said.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 33