She thought his courtliness charming. “How did you sleep?”
“Well enough to perform my morning duties,” he said, with lascivious good humor. He tumbled her, punctuating his kisses with playful bites. She wrapped her legs around him, her hands and tongue at his neck and shoulders, then she let him go.
His eyelids opened in surprise. “Don’t stop,” he said.
“I’m not stopping, just looking,” she murmured, and slid from his sight, down the thin, hairy path to his groin.
Afterward, they lay together in the damp sheets, lightly tracing circular shapes on each other’s arms.
“I had a strange dream last night,” he said, smiling shyly. “I was in Warsaw, at the apartment of my friend, on Nalewki Street. There were several of us there, playing music, singing old Polish songs. The door opened and there was Hillel, from your photograph, with a guitar. He sat down and he played for us. No words, just tunes. Amazing, no?”
Ellen’s face and neck became rigid. Rafael had told her Hillel played guitar, but she was sure she had not mentioned this to Marek. There was no guitar in the photograph.
“It was so strange to see him there, alive,” Marek said. “My friends did not know he wasn’t from our time, and he did not speak. But he looked at me, and his tunes touched my heart. I remember thinking this in the dream. This touches my heart.” He put his hand to his chest and looked at Ellen.
Ellen thought of Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav.
“His melodies were like your ‘For-a-GirlTune’” Marek went on. “Only now I cannot remember them.” He pulled at his hair in frustration and raised himself on his elbows, staring absently at the light now streaming through the open window.
Ellen said nothing, thinking it too much to invite Freidl into the conversation.
“Now you must let me perform the rest of my duty,” he said, turning back to her with a soldier’s solemnity. He got up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. The water ran for several minutes. The toilet flushed. Ellen began to wonder what he was doing, until he emerged, clean-shaven. She leaped from the bed and ran her forefinger over the place below his lip where the little tuft of hair had been. “Wow!” she said, laughing. “You look great!”
He tickled her nose. “Shall we try a kiss without it?”
“Absolutely.” She draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed the cleanly shaven place. “’Bye, little beard,” she whispered, and kissed his lips. They nuzzled, gawky as teenagers, nose to nose, lips to forehead, cheek to cheek, neither wanting to give up the embrace, until Ellen felt a breeze from the window and saw the curtain flutter slightly. It made her think of the white linen shroud floating there in her dream. She sighed. “I have to go to the studio this morning. I need to work,” she said.
He nodded. “I have a rehearsal today also.” He winked at her as he began to let her go. “I will see you tonight?”
“You bet.” She missed him already.
An hour later, she sat on the studio floor and stared at the question she had written in her spiral notebook. Who is Miriam? She took a pen and the Tanakh from her backpack and wrote, Dancer, leads women, plays timbrel, crosses Red Sea to the Promised Land, a prophet. Nothing about this attracted her. It was like a description of one of those awful paintings hanging on Floriaska Street.
A knot formed in her stomach and sent up a wave of nausea that tickled the back of her throat. Ellen took a deep breath and stared out the window at the sky, which was very blue that morning, like on the day she had walked into Szeroka Square for the first time and had seen the reflection of clouds in all the windows. She realized that something had begun for her that day, although she couldn’t yet say what it was. Her temples pulsed as she began to consider her other worry. She rubbed them with her thumbs. Why would any of this help Freidl rest?
Konstantin Pronaszko opened the door. “Good morning, my innovator from America,” he said brightly. “How is the work?”
Ellen felt like a schoolkid caught unprepared for a test and desperate for excuses. The tape player gave her the idea to say, “I have the music.” With that, she realized she could probably lay out enough elements of the piece to satisfy him.
He grabbed a folding chair and, turning it backward, seated himself. “Let me hear.”
She played the tune, vacillating between feelings of certainty and strength about how right it was for her to use it, and fear that she was exploiting something private and fragile.
When the music ended, Pronaszko, his head cradled in his hands, waited a dramatic minute or so before asking, “And the dance. What is it about?”
“It’s a prayer,” she said, surprised at her own certainty.
He scratched the back of his neck and stared skeptically at his own image in the mirror behind her. “What is the prayer? This is Jewish music. You are not going to bore us, please, with bad Nazis and suffering Jews?” Without pausing to give her a chance to correct him, he charged on. “This has been done. And done. I do not want my company to revisit Auschwitz with an American. That is a very uninteresting aspect to me.”
Ellen was not put off by his unexpected vehemence. After all, she had no intention of doing the kind of piece he was describing. What made her scalp crawl, from the hairline back, was his linking the words American and uninteresting.
Pronaszko put down his satchel and let his focus drift to the pigeons nestling on the studio’s window ledge, as if trying to think of a way to salvage the situation with her.
Strangely, Ellen got the feeling he was trying to be supportive, that he was leaving her room to elaborate. Something disturbed the pigeons. They flew off with a powerful rustling of wings, reminding her how the crow who had fallen into her apartment air shaft in New York had regained its strength to fly.
“The dance is a prayer for grass to sprout from the earth around the gravestones,” she said. “It’s about Miriam the prophetess—Moses’ sister—and her timbrel.” A smile came, almost unwittingly, to her lips at having offered Pronaszko a sampling from her list of elements, enough to let him know she was not going to Auschwitz. “I’m thinking it’s a dance about Poland, from my eyes.”
He looked at her as if he had no idea anymore who this girl was.
Members of the company began to arrive, and Pronaszko was forced to turn his attention to them. Ellen gathered her things. “Let us see something next week,” he called to her as she left. She thought she detected excitement in his voice.
She walked downstairs with a sense of confidence, which she hoped would last.
39
WHEN SHE ARRIVED AT HER HOTEL, ELLEN PICKED UP A MESSAGE from Marek asking her to call him at the Ariel Café.
“Forgive me, a hundred times, that I forgot to tell you,” he said when she reached him. “There are so many festivals in Kraków in the summer. But the Jewish Culture Festival is new this year. My group is on the schedule to play. Today, when we were making arrangements with the organizers, I realized you would be interested. Not for my group, you can hear us other times. But they have organized workshops all over Kazimierz, of Jewish cooking and dancing and arts, and things like this.”
Ellen thought the idea of a Jewish Culture Festival in a city of almost no Jews rather strange. “What’s the festival about?” she asked, hoping this was not going to be another kitschy Polish interpretation of Jewishness, the sort of imitation thing his band did, with the black-and-white clothes and silly hats.
“I have the schedule here. Tonight is a music concert by a Jewish composer that I think we will like. A quartet.”
Quartet somehow sounded relatively harmless to her. “Where is it?” she asked, wondering who but the two of them would be interested in attending.
“It is at the Stara Synagoga, the Old Synagogue, near the Ariel Café. You know it?”
“I know it,” she said. Seated on the edge of her bed, she pointed her feet and watched goose bumps rise on her calves as she pictured the photograph of the girl in the black suede pumps. “I’d like
to go.”
That night, they met for dinner at a small restaurant near Wawel Hill, a block from the Café where she’d had coffee on her second day in Kraków. They sat side by side, in the European way, and Ellen realized that even if the neighborhood, with its imposingly lit cathedral on the hill, had become familiar to her, it was still not hers in the way New York had become hers.
Marek handed her the schedule for the Jewish Culture Festival. “See how many workshops there are all week?” He ran his finger down the list. “Cooking. Hebrew calligraphy. Singing. Klezmer. They also have films and lectures.”
She was taken with his almost proprietary pride in the festival.
“Look,” he said, pointing to an event scheduled to take place at eleven o’clock the next morning, “even a workshop in Jewish paper-cutting.”
She took a look at the schedule. “Rafael has paper cutouts hung on his walls,” she said. “If you want to see the real thing, you could drive me to Zokof tomorrow. What do you say, partner?”
Marek leaned toward her. “You are really an American girl, the way you talk.” He smiled at her provocatively. “You are just like in the movies. I like it.” He touched his newly shaved chin. “And I would like very much to go with you to Zokof tomorrow. It is almost as wonderful as my idea.” He pulled his cloth shoulder sack from the floor and discreetly pulled out a plastic shopping bag. “I have brought my change of clothes so I do not have to go back home tonight.”
She played with the indigo silk shawl draped over her shoulders and gave him a studied sideward look. “Are all Polish guys this presumptuous?”
The last word threw him off. He seemed uncertain if she was annoyed with him. “The students where I share rooms are having fun guessing where I was last night,” he said.
Ellen realized she knew almost nothing about how Marek lived his daily life. He had never mentioned roommates. “Then let’s keep them guessing.” She winked, preferring for the moment to keep him for herself, without social connections.
Later, when they arrived for the concert, the Old Synagogue was almost filled. The audience was mostly Polish. Ellen expressed her surprise at the large turnout, but Marek explained how Poles love music concerts. “We like to get dressed up and tell everyone shhh,” he said. Ellen laughed, and on cue, the people in front of them turned around. When the quartet began, she and Marek held hands. The white-vaulted sanctuary glowed brightly, even without sunlight. The music was intricate, modern, and otherworldly, like a conversation of distant voices. Marek clasped his other hand over hers and held it tight. At intermission, she took him by the arm and explained, with some satisfaction, this was the bimah, and that was the Aron Kodesh, where the Torah scrolls were kept. He nodded appreciatively. “I have seen this building only from the outside. I did not ever go in because I was afraid it was a dark place, like a prison, you know? I did not imagine it would be so beautiful.”
Ellen was startled and touched that he had had the same reticence about entering the building as she’d had. “It is beautiful,” she said, admiring the interior space anew. She was glad they had come.
They took the tram back to Old Town, content with their evening’s success. Fog had lifted from the Vistula. It snaked through the streets in long puffs that made Ellen think of Kraków’s dragon. Arriving at the Palace Hotel, they went up to her room. Their heads brushed together slightly as Ellen searched her purse for the key. She smiled at him, opened the wing of her shawl, and led him into the room. Marek slipped his satchel off his shoulder and followed her onto the bed, where he unfastened the long line of crocheted buttons that held together the front of her dress. She cupped his head in her hands, ran her fingers through the length of his hair, and kissed him. He laid her back against the pillows and slid his hand between her legs. “Now we make our concert,” he said.
In the morning, they awoke to the street sounds of a working weekday. A truck gate opened with a loud squeal, and Ellen sat straight up in bed. “We better get going,” she said.
Marek rolled over to see the clock. “No problem. It is only seven thirty. We have time.” He pulled her back into his arms.
She patted his chest impatiently. “Time to go,” she said.
He pretended to be injured. “You are tired of me already?”
She jumped out of bed, grabbed his hand, and pulled him after her. “How could I possibly get tired of a langer loksh? Take a shower with me?”
“What are you calling me?” he said, following her into the bathroom, all smiles again.
After breakfast, they shopped for fruits and vegetables at an outdoor market. Marek bought a bouquet. “We cannot visit your friend in Zokof without flowers,” he said. “It is the Polish custom.”
“It’s a very nice custom,” Ellen said, pleased by the respect implicit in the gesture. But she stopped him from buying chocolates. “They’re probably not kosher.”
“But he can say a blessing on them and make them kosher,” Marek protested.
“It doesn’t work that way,” she told him. But she was mildly puzzled herself at how it did work. In her room, she had another package of kosher goods ready for Rafael. She’d asked her mother to send it. All the items were marked with a kosher symbol, but she had no idea what requirements they’d had to meet.
They left Kraków in the Fiat in the muggy July heat and headed north into the rolling yellow hills. They passed corrugated-roofed barns, grazing black-and-white cows, fenced gardens surrounding tiny wooden houses, slanted sheds, and farmers in horse-drawn wagons, all of which now looked somewhat less novel to Ellen. She rested her head against the window frame and closed her eyes.
“I am looking forward to meeting your friend,” Marek said.
She glanced at him, aware of potential trouble ahead. There was a real possibility that despite Freidl’s blessing, Rafael might not trust Marek because he was a Pole. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy meeting you too. But he can be gruff,” she warned. “Be patient.”
Marek reached across the gearshift and touched her knee. “He is old. I know about old people. My grandfather is eighty-six.”
“That’s not what makes him gruff,” she said uncomfortably.
“I understand. It is the war that changed them, that generation.” He glanced at her. “They are different from us, because of what they lived.”
Ellen did not want to argue the point. She had no idea what had happened to Poles like Marek’s grandfather, and she didn’t feel like discussing Rafael’s past before the two men had met. “I’m sure that’s true,” she said, looking away.
“The old people teach us to keep Poland’s freedom in our hearts.” He touched his chest demonstratively, as if he didn’t think she would understand. “We have a holiday in November, All Saints’ Day. This is a holy day everywhere, but in Poland it is when we mourn for our heroes, and our past. We take flowers and wreaths and light candles at the graves and the monuments from the Nazi time. The air on that day is thick with smoke from millions of those candles, like a blanket over us.”
Ellen nodded, thinking of the Yahrzeit candles she’d seen at Jewish memorials in the past. It struck her how closely Polish and Jewish symbols and sensibilities dovetailed without touching. “I think your grandfather and Rafael might remember the war very differently,” she said.
“I do not think so,” he replied. “The war came to everyone in Poland. When they tell their stories from that time, we know that history does not happen to strangers. It happened to them.”
Ellen regretted their having once again stumbled onto the detritus of the Holocaust, which always seemed to create conflict between them. She shrugged slightly. “You know what I’m starting to think? I think it matters less what you believe, what faith you follow, than what kind of a person you make yourself because of that faith. The world is full of monstrously religious people.”
Marek patted her knee again. “Good, because now we are in the beautiful Malٯpolska Uplands, where a person should love nature and not worry about monstrou
sly religious people.”
She grinned, knowing he was trying to bring them back to common ground. “Okay, Mr. Tourist Guide, tell me all about the beautiful Małpolska Uplands.”
“First, some Bruce Springsteen,” he said, pulling out a cassette tape.
Ellen loved the sheer absurdity of hearing “Born in the USA” burst from the clanky little Fiat’s speakers in the middle of Poland. They sang along, laughing that neither could make out the words for half the stanzas.
Not long after, they crossed the plain of fallow summer fields and arrived in Zokof. Seeing it again, Ellen was almost sorry at having brought Marek to this shoddy little place.
It was nearly noon, and people were out shopping. On the street that led to the main square, Marek braked for a group of boys kicking around a soccer ball. The bell tower chimed from the onion-domed church. The air was filled with the sweet smell of cut grass. Ellen breathed it in and realized she would have been disappointed if it hadn’t been there to greet her return.
At the now familiar curved narrow lane that led to Rafael’s house, the breeze blew gently through the open car windows and mussed their hair. That Freidl was somehow with them at that moment comforted Ellen and even made her smile. “Marek, turn here,” she said.
They approached Rafael’s house. “There he is!” she shouted.
Rafael, in his broad brimmed black hat and his gabardine, emerged from the door and stood waiting for them.
“How did he know we were here?” Marek asked.
Ellen flicked a lock of Marek’s hair into place and prepared herself to make the introductions. “I don’t know,” she said. They parked in front of the house.
Rafael stepped down to the street as Ellen jumped out to greet him. Without thinking, she hooked her arm in his.
“She came to me last night!” he said, looking down at his arm.
“She came to me the night before.” Suddenly realizing his embarrassment at her touch, she turned hastily to Marek, who was standing by the driver’s side of the car, looking quizzically at the two of them. “Rafael Bergson,” Ellen said, dropping her hands to her sides, “this is my friend Marek Gruberski.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 34