He nodded. “You are right, of course. What can I say? But that is the way it was. All of Warsaw was a ruin. Rubble everywhere. They had too much to rebuild. It is different with us now, truly. In Warsaw, we have a Yiddish Theater, and almost everyone acting in this theater is Polish. People ask, Who comes here? Who understands this language anymore? But it is not just tourists in the audience, or even the old Jews who know this language. Polish people come. They want to hear these plays and this language. It is part of our history, you see? You cannot separate it.”
“But where do you go with that? There are no more Jews here.”
He shook his finger at her. “That is not true. I meet Jews here today. When I was a child I had a half-Jewish friend. His parents were very unusual because they raised him Jewish. His mother is the Jew, and he said that makes him Jewish. But he was unhappy because it is very difficult not to be Catholic in our country. He is very beautiful, and the girls always liked him, except there were no Jewish girls. His parents were going to move to Israel so he could marry. But then he met people at a place in Grzybowski Square, most of them half-Jewish also, or with a grandparent who is Jewish. They have a rabbi who comes and talks to them and helps them. So it is better for him now, and I think he is much happier. He has a girlfriend, a half Jew, but the right half, he says.” Andrzej shrugged, with a kind of resigned sadness.
Ellen put her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for telling me all this. You know, you could choreograph a hell of a dance about you and your friend,” she said.
He smiled at her, in his old flirtatious way. “Then I think today you should accept my offer to have coffee.”
“I accept,” she said, and they went down the stairs of the old building together.
45
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, SUMMER HEAT AND A GRIMY HUMIDITY enveloped Kraków, enervating even the tourists, who could be seen dragging themselves through Old Town from site to requisite site.
In the studio, Ellen ran on adrenaline and nerves, impervious to the weather, instructing the company with such determination the dancers seemed disinclined, or simply too overheated, to challenge her. Most afternoons, the air was thick with the smell of sweat, which made large spreading stains on their leotards and tights. But she drove them on, demanding precision and energy in their every movement.
Pronaszko came by every day to watch them work, but he refused Ellen’s invitations to stay for an entire rehearsal. “When you have something substantial to show me, you will let me know,” he told her.
With the performance date approaching, she thought such patience risky and out of character for a man who had insisted on a tight schedule for finishing the sets, props, costumes, and all her lighting designs. Construction had already begun on the simple, stable tree structure the two of them had drafted with the set designer. On edge from keeping track of these details and from the constant adjustments she was making in her choreography, Ellen only hoped Pronaszko’s relaxed attitude indicated confidence in her abilities. She gave herself a week’s deadline to finalize the piece, then took Pronaszko aside. “I’m going to have the musicians here for rehearsal next Tuesday. With the live sound, I think you’ll get a feel of the piece. We’ll do a run through of Part Two.”
Pronaszko ran his hands through his hair. “Done,” he said happily.
Ellen felt as if she’d just thrown herself out the window.
That night, she took the tram to the Ariel Café and met with the musicians. Pawelؠand Stefan were both wildly excited about performing for a dance company. “We will bring our performance clothes with us,” they promised eagerly.
“No. No,” Ellen said, hoping not to sound so alarmed by the suggestion that they would take offense. “Wear your regular clothes.”
“But what will we wear at the performance?”
“We’re going to get you black jeans, white T-shirts, and black baseball caps.” She didn’t have the heart to tell them their sentimental Polish ideas of Jewish dress were uncool, and that she wasn’t interested in reinforcing their notions of mythological Jews in her piece. She assumed they would figure out for themselves that the caps looked like modern yarmulkes. Marek had put his arm around her and said, “You are the director. We’ll wear what you think is best.” She’d laughed, he had kissed her cheerfully, and they’d all had a shot of kosher vodka.
The following Tuesday, Marek, Paweł, and Stefan appeared at the studio door with a bass, a clarinet, and the electric violin Marek had suggested they use because he thought the sound would carry better outside. The whole company was there, rehearsing. Ellen was nervous, for herself and for the musicians. “Come in,” she said, hoping to sound welcoming. She introduced the musicians to the company and asked Marek to explain to them why he was interested in Jewish music.
She watched him speak to them in Polish, and noticed that with him, they asked questions. She didn’t know if this was because they were now more absorbed in the dance piece or if his commitment to it, as a Pole, held more weight with them. Henryk spoke up fervently. Marek responded, and the discussion took on a heated quality. She saw that he was already at home among them, while she, in her folding chair, felt awkward in her inability to participate. They all had so many opinions, she thought, none of which they ever expressed to her. Their distrust, or whatever it was, pained her, and her inability to follow what they were saying made her feel, once again, the frustrations of the deaf.
When the dancers and musicians had finished talking, she took Marek aside. The dancers began warming up. Stefan and Paweł were getting out their instruments. “What did you say?” she asked him.
“I said I was trained in classical music, but I discovered Jewish music quite by accident and now it is the music I love most. I said I think of it as Polish music and that the more I play it, the more it is evolving into something not really all Jewish anymore, and not really Polish, but something between.” He winked at her. “I said that to me, this music is a sacred kingdom. Henryk did not understand this.” He shrugged. “But I told them that the story of the tune we’re playing is very special to you.”
“What did you tell them?” Ellen asked anxiously.
Marek picked up the electric violin and began to tune it. “I told them it is the story of how a man named Aaron Birnbaum, who wrote some of the best Jewish music of his generation, loved a woman named Freidl, and how he made his love live for generations with this tune, even if he and Freidl had no future.”
Ellen got a knot in her throat. Marek must have seen her distress because he laid down his violin and tenderly began to stroke her back. She saw Andrzej glance up at them and knew that he had guessed their relationship.
Marek whispered, “You know, they told me they like this dance. They are discovering things in it. They think it is very spiritual. The Jewish part, for them, is exotic. That is all it is. But they like it. It is not what they thought it would be.” He smiled at her. “I thought maybe I should tell you now because probably they will not. They don’t know how to talk about this with you.”
“But I need them to talk about it so they understand it.”
“No. You need to teach them the feelings you want them to dance. It is not their job to have to know what everything means.”
She wasn’t sure if he was right about this, but still, it came as a tremendous relief to hear him say it.
That evening, Ellen returned to her room completely exhausted from the rehearsal. It had gone more smoothly than she had expected, and Pronaszko had seemed genuinely pleased. But now she lay on her bed staring at the wingback chair, overwhelmed by the enormity of what she did not know about Torah, Talmud, Jewish history and lore. Such ignorance could cost her, she told herself. She could be making gross historical and theological mistakes in her choreography and not know it. That would bring dishonor to the memory of her father and grandfather, to Freidl, to the Jews of Zokof, to Polish Jews, to Jews everywhere. She would be ridiculed. Pronaszko would turn his back on her. Her work would neve
r be commissioned again. Her head chattered on and on. She felt as if she were falling. Instinctively, she curled into a fetal position. Her breathing became shallow and quick. Minutes passed. She clutched two fistfuls of her hair and finally forced herself to say aloud, “That’s enough, for God’s sake. Breathe.” She sat up and leafed through her notebook, looking for something to distract her from her anxiety.
Halfway through, she stopped at the question she had written at the studio. Who is Miriam? It seemed to her that if she could find Miriam’s place in the dance, the prayer would truly pour out of her heart, as Marek had suggested it could. At the very least, it calmed her to search the Tanakh for references to Miriam.
What she found was that after Miriam’s Song of the Sea, much is made in the Torah of her two younger brothers, Moses and Aaron, but other than one strange scene where God struck Miriam with leprous white scales for disapproving of Moses’ marriage to a Cushite woman, the only other time she is mentioned is at her death. The Israelites arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there. The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron.
Ellen thought it odd that the death of Miriam was followed not with descriptions of her burial or how people mourned her, but by the absence of water. She recalled a Passover Seder a few years back, when her cousin Laura, who had taken on the peculiar job of being the “Jewish one” in her family, had placed a glass of water on the table. “It’s a symbol of Miriam’s Well,” she had said. “We need to bring the women back into our story.” But Ellen didn’t remember her explanation of what exactly Miriam’s Well was, and she couldn’t find any mention of it in the Tanakh. Eventually, she closed the book and fell asleep.
Freidl stared intently at Ellen from the wingback chair. The white handkerchief floated above her head, filled with light. But under the great plaid blanket her bearing suggested a profound sadness.
Ellen sat up in bed. It had been many nights since Freidl had come to her. “Where are you when you aren’t with me or Rafael?” she asked.
Freidl shrugged weakly. “A place like that you shouldn’t know from.”
It occurred to Ellen this was the expression her grandfather used about Poland. “What happened to you after you left your resting place?”
Freidl fingered the fringes of the great plaid blanket for some time before answering. “It is written in the Book of Lamentations what happened to me,” she said. “He has walled me in; I cannot escape; He has blocked my ways with cut stones. He has made my paths a maze.”
“But where are you?”
“I am in the blue. That is all. I do not know where this is or even what it is, only that there is nothing there but blue and silence. Without the walls of our House of the Living around me, Elleneh, I have no way to mark my way back to Him. I am floating there alone.”
“Floating?” Ellen was taken aback by the image. “You’re in water?”
Freidl shrugged.
“How do you escape it to come to me?”
She shrugged again. “God has His ways. I do not understand them. What it is He wants of me now, I do not know. Only that at certain times, He allows that I should leave.” She looked at the Tanakh at Ellen’s side. “So tell me a shtickl Torah.”
“I want to know why it says that when Miriam died there was no water.”
Freidl’s face lit up with pleasure and pride. “Such a Jewish head you have!”
Confused by the compliment, Ellen blushed.
“You should know that centuries ago the great sage Rashi asked that same question in the Talmud. His midrash was that for the forty years the Israelites were in the desert, they drank from Miriam’s Well.”
“I’ve heard of Miriam’s Well,” Ellen said excitedly. “But what is it?”
“It is said that on the second day of creation, God hid living waters in the earth. Those who drank of them were reminded that His Torah is the source of restoration and redemption. Their location was revealed only to a few. Abraham knew, and Miriam, whose intimate knowledge of the waters led us out of slavery in Egypt and redeemed us in the desert. But when Miriam died, the well ran dry and disappeared. There are those who believe that her well is still in the world and that those who study Torah cause new wells to spring forth. Even here in Poland, the Hassidim say that the well reappears whenever Jews sing to it with the proper kavonah, the right heart.”
Ellen looked at Freidl. “Are you in those waters?”
At first, Freidl seemed taken with the idea, but then she said, “It cannot be. A well is a circle, an enclosed place. I am without boundaries, in a great blue emptiness.” She seemed to collapse inward when she spoke of it. “There is no opening above.”
But Ellen could not let go of the idea of Miriam’s Well as somehow connected to Freidl’s redemption. She felt a sense of urgency. “Is there another midrash about the meaning of Miriam’s Well’s disappearance?”
A puzzled smile appeared on Freidl’s face. “How is it you knew to ask this question?” She shook her head. “My father used to teach his students a certain midrash about Miriam’s Well. He told the story that when the great Rabbi Bunam was on his deathbed, may his name be for a blessing, he asked his wife, ‘Why do you weep? My life was given me just so I might learn to die.’ But that is not why his wife wept, my father said. She was about to lose the one who had sustained her for a lifetime. When we lose such a person, the well dries up.”
Neither of them spoke. Ellen’s eyes were awash with tears for her father. So were Freidl’s.
Freidl looked off. “There is another reason I know. We cry for the dying because we ourselves are afraid. In the hour of his death, my father’s face shone with love for all of us gathered around him and with love for his God. That is the share of one who is able to look with satisfaction at having filled his life with what is important and passed that on to others. To die with the taste of such knowledge as that on our lips is to die well. For me, there was no such death. All my life I beat against the walls. I injured my love for my father with anger when he denied me Aaron Birnbaum. I destroyed what peace I could have made with my husband, Berel, by seeing only what he lacked. I cursed him that he did not give me children, that I could not nurture a new generation.
“But when Berel went to his grave four years before me, I discovered that the source of my misery was even deeper than what I thought. I was alone for the first time. And for the first time it became clear to me that life was not forever. This fury at being denied Aaron Birnbaum, this anger at my husband, I saw they were only distractions, my excuses not to love life itself, as God commands us.
“In the end, when I faced the Angel of Death, I knew my real sin. I had refused to love. I had made nothing worthy of my father’s name. I left nothing. And still I thought of myself as someone specially set apart by God, so chosen that Death would not touch me. When my time came, I met it with my old friend Anger that I should not have to go that way alone. I breathed my last reciting the spiteful Psalm of David. ‘What do You gain by my blood if I go down to the Pit? Can the dust praise You or proclaim Your faithfulness?’ And for such chutzpah, I have been banished to a blue eternity to contemplate these sins and to despair of hope for redemption from a God who no longer listens to my prayers.”
Ellen was shocked by the vehemence of Freidl’s confession. But there was really only one thing she now wanted to know. “What was it that you really wanted from life?” she asked. She could see Freidl’s confusion, how she was struggling to compose herself.
“I wanted that I should be first in my father’s eyes, as his student. I wanted the love of Aaron Birnbaum. I wanted a child,” she whispered.
“You did all that,” Ellen said.
Freidl looked mystified.
“You were first in your father’s eyes. You were the one he called on when no one else knew the answer. He taught you in the way you should go, and when you grew old, you did not depart
from it. Proverbs 22?”
Freidl smiled at Ellen’s recall.
“As for Aaron, you took what you loved best about him with you, your passion for him. It went into the tune you’ve been singing for three generations. What greater act of love is there?”
Freidl’s expression hardened. “But what you had with your langer loksh, I never had,” she said bitterly.
Ellen laughed. “Okay, you missed good sex. But remember that night Marek and I were together? Remember when I asked you how long it would have lasted between you and Aaron when he brought no money home and you had to go out and make the living? No more studying, Freidl. It would have been up to you to feed the endless children all your sex would have produced.”
Freidl rose swiftly. A dark shadow swirled around her. “What does it matter anymore what I wanted? My life is done. I wasted everything, and I am cut off, blocked out, suffocated in blue waters with no way to redeem myself. Don’t deny it.”
The words poured forth, wild and hysterical. “‘Return her timbrel, and she will make an opening for you to return.’ My father promised me!” She raised her arms until they stretched like wings under the blanket. “Do you see me? I have no timbrel. I sing and they do not hear. I call out and there is no sound. You cannot make an opening for me because I did not teach your grandfather how to be a Jew. I did not teach your father either. And I have not taught you anything but what I know, the head, not the heart. It is not enough. Your Jewish soul is too small, too unnourished.”
Ellen moved toward Freidl with open arms, offering her an embrace.
“Do not dare to come to me now,” Freidl screamed. “I do not know how to nourish you. I am unfit for such motherhood. I am lost.”
Before the frightened and deeply hurt Ellen could argue with her, Freidl was gone, swirled away and swallowed by the shadows in the room.
When Ellen awoke the next morning, her Tanakh lay on the floor, its pages ripped from the bindings and scattered about the room like the white scales of Miriam’s leprosy. She had no idea whose anger had done this, hers or Freidl’s. A wail tore from her throat at the destruction of the book her father had entrusted to her with so much hope. It filled the room with an awful sound and broke into waves of sobs.
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 40