Marek offered a friendly wave.
Rafael acknowledged him with a nod. “So this is the one she talks about.”
Marek smiled hopefully. “I hope she speaks well of me.”
It was clear to Ellen that Rafael had referred to Freidl, not to her, but she said nothing, hoping to forestall further mention of Freidl until the two men had gotten to know each other better.
Fortunately, they were all distracted by the arrival of a man walking a dog with a rope for a leash. The man stopped a few yards from the car and stared at the three of them. He seemed particularly interested in the bouquet of flowers Marek had taken from the car. When it became apparent that Rafael did not intend to introduce the young strangers, the man pulled at the tip of his cap, offered a muffled greeting to Rafael, and moved on.
“Now the whole town will be talking,” Rafael muttered. “Come inside.”
They unloaded the food from the car and carried it into the house. “It’s all kosher,” Ellen assured Rafael. The house was hot, and the smell of dirt and sweat hung in the humid air. She took the flowers from Marek, glad for their fresh fragrance.
Rafael glanced at the grocery bags. “So much kosher food I did not know we had in all of Poland,” he said. “Am I such a fresser?”
Marek smiled, but Ellen could see he didn’t understand.
“A fresser’s someone who eats a lot,” she explained on her way to the kitchen for a flower vase. “I learned that from my grandmother. To her, it was a compliment. But trust me, Rafael’s no fresser.” She gave him a look of mock disapproval.
Marek laughed. “My grandmother is the same! Always trying to feed.”
Rafael showed them how to stock the kitchen shelves. It seemed to Ellen that Marek knew his way around this kind of rough kitchen, with its porcelain-tiled stove, its dented enamel pans, the coal bucket, and worn linoleum floor. It occurred to her that the two men knew a daily way of life that was completely foreign to her.
They all sat down at the round table at the end of the main room. Ellen pointed out the Jewish paper cutouts, and Marek admired them. He mentioned the paper-cutting workshop being held at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków. Rafael acknowledged that he had heard of the festival. But beneath this politeness Ellen sensed some tension.
“I’m very honored to meet you Pan Bergson. Perhaps Ellen has told you I play Jewish music,” Marek said, as if he felt obligated to justify his presence. “I’m especially interested in the music from this region. I wonder if you could tell me why there is more Jewish music from here than from most other regions of Poland.”
Ellen almost did not recognize this earnest musicological researcher. She had expected Marek to simply ask if Rafael knew the “For-a-GirlTune” or to question him about the tunes he’d heard in his dream.
Rafael gave Marek an indulgent look. “The reason for the music, Gruberski, is God. This is music from God, music to God.” He was frowning, but his tone was like a teacher’s. “You young people like the tunes because they are lively. But for us, these are prayers. They free the human soul from bondage.” He stroked his beard, assessing Marek’s reaction.
Marek nodded but remained respectfully silent. Ellen wondered if he would have the nerve to say to Rafael that he, a Pole, also heard prayers in Jewish music. She wondered how Rafael knew that young people liked the tunes and which young people he meant. Most of all, she hoped Rafael would not dismiss Marek as someone whose interest did not matter, like the Jewish boy Kopelman who had not mattered at Marek’s school.
Rafael squinted. “You ask, why so many tunes from this area? I’ll tell you, Gruberski, how it was. Before the war, the streets in our town were twisted as a yeshiva bucher’s argument.” He raised his crooked, arthritic fingers. “You know what a yeshiva bucher is?” he asked testily.
“A student?”
Ellen wondered how Marek knew.
“In such streets as ours, melodies made echoes.” Rafael cupped his hands and held them out for Marek to see. “We lived and prayed like in a musical nest.” Almost imperceptibly, he pushed out his chin, suggesting a challenge.
“Are you saying the reason for the music is architectural?” Marek asked tentatively.
“The reason for the music, Gruberski, is God.”
There was silence in the room. It occurred to Ellen that a non-Jew’s interest in Jewish culture was so inconceivable to Rafael that he regarded it merely as Marek’s attempt to ingratiate himself.
Marek wiped his perspiring forehead and looked at a loss as to how to proceed. Ellen was about to come to his rescue when Rafael added, “You have heard of Rebbe Israel, son of Rebbe Samuel-Elie, alev ha sholem?”
“I have heard of Rebbe Israel,” Marek said.
Ellen hadn’t counted on Marek really having that much expertise, and she was pleased.
“They said Rebbe Israel wrote more melodies than King David.” He bent toward Marek. “You know also of Aaron Birnbaum? Less famous, but maybe more talented.”
The hair stood up on the back of Ellen’s damp neck, sending charges up and down her back.
Marek looked dejected, as if he sensed things were not going well between him and Rafael. “I do not know him.”
“Aaron Birnbaum wrote the ‘For-a-GirlTune’ Ellen said quietly. “And probably the others you heard.”
Marek turned to her in surprise. “How do you know this?”
“There was a woman named Freidl. She was from this town. He sang those tunes to her.” The explanation seemed so inadequate, she added, “Because he loved her.”
Marek smiled, apparently mistaking this for flirtation. “If I could hear some of Aaron Birnbaum’s tunes, I would be very grateful,” he told Rafael. “My group would be very interested to learn them, even if only for their liveliness.”
Ellen realized he was delicately trying to make the point that he was interested in the music in a serious way, but Rafael would not go along. He seemed suddenly annoyed. “If you want to learn, then listen for them,” he said flatly. “They are still here, underneath.”
Marek looked at Ellen uneasily, but she didn’t know what, or how much more, she should say about the music, or Freidl, or why Rafael had reacted as he had. “Why don’t we eat lunch?” she suggested. “Then, Rafael, could we go to the cemetery?”
“Of course we will go to the cemetery,” Rafael said evenly.
“Maybe you’d like to rest first?” Ellen asked him.
Rafael rose and began to set out the dishes for lunch. “Rest? Rest is for the dead.” He winked at her.
40
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON WHEN THEY LEFT THE HOUSE AND drove through town to the cemetery. Ellen had climbed into the Fiat’s backseat. Rafael sat up front. “Slow. Slow,” he scolded Marek.
Through the streets and narrow lanes, people watched them with the studied, impassive expressions that Ellen had at first excused as curiosity, but now regarded as hostility. They recognized her Jewish face, she thought, and she blushed. What bothered her was not only that people chose to look at her as a Jew, but that it mattered to them. She wanted to know what satisfaction they got from playing this game of Us versus You. She looked at Marek. She wanted to ask him what the Zokofers might be thinking, but she didn’t want to embarrass him in front of Rafael.
“I will show you first where was Avrum Kollek’s mill,” Rafael said. “Your grandfather told you about Avrum Kollek?”
Marek glanced at her expectantly.
“No,” she said. “Who was he?”
Rafael dismissed her question with a grunt. “Your grandfather worked in Avrum Kollek’s mill. On the night the peasant Jan Nowak died, he went from the cemetery to Avrum Kollek. He had a daughter, Shuli. A gorgeous girl, everyone said. And she had eyes for Itzik. She heard everything Itzik told her father. She was there when Avrum left to ask the Russian magistrate to protect the people.” He shook his head. “Ach! A waste of breath.”
Marek seemed about to ask him a question, but Rafael went on. “After,
Shuli ran to Itzik’s mother’s house, to Sarah, to tell him to leave Zokof. A brave girl to do that, with what was going on in the town that night.”
Ellen listened to this, completely captivated by the thought of a gorgeous girl named Shuli having a crush on her grandfather. Perhaps, she imagined, at fourteen her grandpa Isaac had that shy, reluctant quality that girls, herself included, found so attractive. Perhaps this was what had hardened, in adulthood, into his well-known stubbornness.
“Later, a year after Avrum went to his death, alev ha sholem, she married a gozlin named Pinchas—a swindler, you understand? He married her for the mill, a business he didn’t know from.”
“What happened to Shuli?”
Rafael shrugged. “What happened? Your grandfather she must have taken for dead. When Pinchas blessed her with a son, she named him Itzik.” He smiled slightly at Shuli’s mischief.
“Is she still alive?”
“Ptuh! She went to Treblinka, with a transport of Jews from Garbatka. Stop here,” he directed Marek. Ellen and Marek exchanged uncomfortable looks. Rafael pointed to an opening between two small shacks set at odd angles to the street. “These were part of Avrum Kollek’s mill that used to be here.”
Across the street, a squat elderly couple stared suspiciously at them. Ellen thought that the woman, in her kerchief, and the man, in his tie and white shirt, looked much like the Polish couple she’d met on the Warsaw-Kraków train. But now the sight of them made her angry, and she began a manic tirade in her head. She glared at them. Where were you during the war? What did you do when they pulled the Jews out of their houses here? Did you take the food from your neighbors’ tables? Did you steal the clothes they left drying on the lines? Yet she knew that if she crossed the street, if she pressed them, with Marek translating, the old couple would talk about how it was for them during the war. It would all be very civil and genial. They would tell her how terribly they’d suffered. This would complicate her understanding of what did happen. This dual possibility so annoyed and frustrated her, she swung her attention back to Avrum Kollek’s shacks.
“Now go to that street, by the tree,” Rafael said impatiently. “I will show you where was the market square, before the war.”
Marek took these directions from Rafael without comment. Ellen wondered if he was intimidated or if he was hard at work listening for tunes.
They approached a large concrete apartment block.
“Stop in front,” Rafael said.
Marek shifted into park.
“Tuesday mornings, this place here was full of wagons.” Rafael made a wide arc with his arm, indicating the area before them. “Over there,” he said, pointing to the left, “the women sold fruits, vegetables, baked things, from stalls, you say?”
“Yes,” Ellen told him, although she hardly knew what he meant.
“The cripples and beggars went from one to the other. Such a tummel! All over the town you could hear the chickens and the children. And peddlers—Shmuel the Bookseller.” Rafael smiled. “Moishe the Shoemaker’s fingernails I remember. Half smashed, the other half gone.”
Marek looked out the window. Ellen thought he looked bored, and feeling responsible somehow for sustaining his interest in the tour, she quashed her desire to question Rafael further.
Rafael scanned the area, as if he could see the people he had described. “I must tell you about Velvl the Water Carrier. He came every Tuesday, with the buckets swinging from the yoke on his shoulders. The Iron Yoke, he called it, like in the days of Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar. Velvl, may his name be for a blessing. He lived, as we say, on air. A luftmensh, you understand?” He opened his mouth, took in a deep breath, as if to fill his lungs with Velvl. “On Shabbos, such a man was for us a king, a tzaddik of the sweet mysteries of the Zohar.”
Ellen watched Rafael’s shoulders rise and fall until, unconsciously, her own breaths began to synchronize with his.
“In summer, there was dust everywhere,” he continued. “In spring, we were up to our ankles, or more, in mud. Now, let’s go.” He rocked forward and back, as if paying private homage to the site.
Marek shifted into first gear and, at Rafael’s direction, drove to the birch-lined, two-lane blacktop that led out of town. About a quarter of a mile farther, they turned left onto a dirt road.
Rafael turned around to Ellen. “I took your father here. He wasn’t so willing to come as you, but I insisted.”
Ellen nodded, easily imagining her father’s resistance, given his discomfort at all things emotional and all things religious, not to mention his hatred of cemeteries.
The dirt road curved to the left, back toward town. On their right lay a striped, planted field. On their left, the forest. About two hundred yards farther, Rafael announced, “We are here. Park the car.”
They got out and crossed the road to the forest. A path of stone pavers, littered with broken glass bottles, led inside. A crow cawed from the treetops. Several more joined in, and the harsh chorus quickly grew.
Looking up at the birds, Marek broke his silence. “When I was a small boy,” he said, “my uncle Leszek would sometimes put me to bed. I remember he told me, ‘Our angels watch over us.’” Marek stroked his bare chin and glanced at Ellen.
She wasn’t sure what it was about the crows that had prompted him to say this.
“Uncle Leszek told me he talked to the Jewish ghosts. He said, ‘They are in the trees; they are with the birds; they are in the sky before a storm.’” He glanced up again at the birds. “Maybe they watch over this place.”
Ellen looked from him to Rafael, hardly knowing how he would react to this.
Rafael turned toward the path into the forest. “The wall is almost gone. No one can be buried here now.”
“Why not?” Marek asked.
“A Jewish cemetery needs a wall so no Kohane will enter without knowing he has crossed the boundary.” Rafael turned and led them forward, as if no further explanation was warranted.
Ellen shrugged at Marek’s quizzical look and followed Rafael into the forest. The crows made a frightening racket in the trees.
“Your father made a tsimmes about the birds,” Rafael said, without turning.
“He told me about them,” Ellen said, remembering their conversation in his study.
“I told him he should pray, and he prayed. For your grandfather, alev ha sholem, he prayed. And for Freidl, he prayed also.”
Marek looked startled. “Freidl? The woman with the musician, Birnbaum? Why would he pray for her?”
Rafael halted his march and turned to them. “He prayed because a Jew must pray for the souls of his dead.”
“But how was she his dead?” Marek asked.
Rafael looked from him to Ellen. “For almost a hundred years she has wandered Poland, our Freidl, without children to pray for her, without Itzik, your grandfather. When your father came, we thanked God and hoped for rest, but he did not finish what he promised. He wrote me letters like a schoolchild. Excuses is all he made from it. It was not enough.”
Ellen reddened. “You’re not being fair,” she said. “How could you expect him to become someone he wasn’t, just because you wanted him to?”
“I asked him for no more than what he knew he could do. He knew what was expected. This is why his daughter is standing here with me today.”
Ellen’s hearing dulled, as if she were underwater. “But he didn’t know I would be invited to Poland.”
“He knew the Leibers have responsibilities here. The rest was a gift, a coincidence, you could say.” He smiled that slight smile of his.
A rushing noise, like water, again filled Ellen’s blocked ears, and she remembered her father using that word, coincidence.
“Beshert?” she said. “You’re telling me it’s beshert that I’m standing here?”
Rafael gave a short affirmative nod. “Your father had responsibilities.”
The image of Freidl’s stone, buried in her father’s cabinet, now made Ellen feel nauseous. �
��Can you show me the pile of stones where Freidl is buried? My father told me about it.”
Rafael glanced from her to Marek, who seemed confused by this talk. “Come, I will take you to her grave,” he said, and he led them farther down the stone path.
They reached a tall wrought-iron gaslight, the only one. Rafael gave its trunk a few friendly pats, as if in greeting. “It is written in the book of Zechariah that in his dream the prophet saw a lamp stand of gold.” He gripped the gaslight. “Zechariah asked God what it meant. God said, not by might nor by power but by His Spirit alone could the Holy Temple, which was in ruins, be rebuilt. God asked, ‘Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?’” He cleared his throat. “And so it is with us today, in this place.” He looked up at the lamp stand.
Marek looked up at the crows.
The rushing sound continued to course through Ellen’s ears.
They reached the center of the cemetery, where all paths met. To their right, under a tree, was a pile of small stones. They tramped through the thick underbrush and stood before it.
Ellen didn’t know how they would proceed, if she was expected to know a prayer, or if Rafael would consider it some sort of sacrilege for Marek to participate. She waited for his cue.
He merely stared at the stones.
She thought she should step away from the religious and ease the tension she felt between all of them. “Rafael, how exactly did you find the top of her gravestone, the part you gave my father?” she asked.
He picked up a small stone, which he placed on top of the others. “I found it after the war, when I came back to Zokof. The town was a shambles. Blown up. My house was gone. This I told you when you were here last time.” His voice was low and rough. He paused, as if checking to see if she remembered.
Ellen nodded slightly.
“I had nowhere to go, so I went to the cemetery, the only Jewish place left.” He pursed his lips. “The crows were here already. The gravestones...” He made a dismissive cut with his hand. “Gone.” He frowned. “I was standing here, alone. But inside me was a sound, a note, and it felt, this sound, like such a power, like what could reach the heavens. I stood here in this place, and I prayed in that note, that sound. ‘Ribbono shel Oylom—Master of the Universe,’ I said. ‘What have you done here? What have you done here?’ I was frightened of myself, of the anger in that note. But I could not stop it. Be ashamed, I told God in that note. Be ashamed.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 35