Marek blew the shofar. Teruah! The ram’s horn’s staccato screams sounded its battle charge, saying, Transform the world to one of justice and compassion! Speak up! Say, Here I am! Bringing light where there is darkness, understanding where there is ignorance, healing where there is illness, and hope where there is despair.
The Polish banner dancers entered in a line from stage right, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. The Jewish gravestones entered from stage left, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. As Poles and Jews they formed two lines, facing the audience, one behind the other.
A wild, laughing refrain of the “For-a-GirlTune” took over from the shofar, and magically, the mirrored blanket, tied with ribbons at its four corners, rose from the female figure’s shoulders and swooped forward toward the banners and gravestones. Tied to the dowels, it became a wedding canopy over their heads.
The music stopped. The figure, illuminated by the tree-trunk spotlight, shook a timbrel. The sound of approaching wind grew louder.
In unison, the dancers pivoted a quarter turn and faced each other in two lines, as modern Poles and Jews, under the wedding canopy. Ellen was startled at how fraught the moment was with tension and love, confusion and hope—a holy moment, she thought, separate from the world and at the same time brutally of it.
Suspended in that uncertainty of which way they would go, the dance ended in a blackout.
There was a slight pause before the applause began, as if the audience needed a moment to collect itself. The dancers came forward and took their bows. The applause built. They turned and clapped for the musicians, who stood and took their bows from their places in the tree. The dancers took more bows and applauded their audience.
By the time Ellen came onstage there was a standing ovation and what she understood as Polish bravos. She beckoned Pronaszko to come from the wings. Ever the gentleman, he presented her with a large bouquet of flowers and kissed her hand before taking his bow. “Perhaps we should think of an American tour,” he said, smiling, not taking his eyes off the audience. “God be praised.”
Backstage, Ellen was overwhelmed with almost uncontainable glee at having brought about the din of rejoicing that had broken out among the cast. She startled Andrzej with a hug, telling him how great he’d been, and laughed at Piotr, who was swinging Ewa around, screaming. But her joy began to dissipate as she posed for photographs with Pronaszko, traded compliments with the set designers, and smiled at the dancers until she could feel the muscles of her face.
Sadness, like an enveloping silence, began to separate her from everyone. Claiming to have a bad headache, she declined their invitations to celebrate, sincerely promising a rain check.
Leaving the dark streets of Kazimierz in Marek’s car, she wrapped her weary arms around his neck and kissed him. “You were so beautiful,” she told him. “So amazing.” He stopped the car, took her head in his hands, and looked at her. “What is troubling you?” he said.
She was glad he had not been fooled by her smiles. “Marek, I don’t know if we did anything for Freidl.”
He didn’t offer his opinion, and she was grateful he didn’t argue. “We will go to Zokof,” he said.
47
THE COMPANY PERFORMED A DAY OF SMALL BEGINNINGS FOUR times that week, although for Ellen, never so powerfully as on that first night. The morning the set was struck, she walked the length of Szeroka Square, from the Old Synagogue to the grassy memorial for Kraków’s Jews, and stood for a long while surveying the Remuh Synagogue and the surrounding buildings, with their windows reflecting a clouded sky.
She had hoped for a glimpse of Freidl, but there had been no sign of her. No dreams. No images. No tune. Through the days and nights following the last performance, Ellen had found herself whispering, “Where are you?” Before she went to sleep she would plead to her, “Don’t be angry with me. I need you. Come back.” It horrified her to imagine she had sent Freidl back to the blue emptiness, to eternal conscious suffocation and silence. “Teach me in the way I should go,” she said. But still Freidl did not return.
She sent Rafael a note asking him, in the gentlest way she knew, if anything had changed, but she hadn’t yet heard back from him. If she could, she would have driven directly to Zokof, as Marek had offered. But Pronaszko had insisted on setting up meetings with her to discuss future projects. She could not just abandon him, or the company.
On her last day at the studio, it seemed to her the dancers sensed her distance. In a new, halting, and embarrassed English, they tried to entice her back into their circle with amusing stories of things that had gone wrong backstage and how they had worked them out without help from her or from Pronaszko. She appreciated this, and she told them so. She told them she hoped they would do other pieces together. Privately, she encouraged Andrzej to start working on his choreography, promising to send him dance tapes she thought might inspire him. But even as the company lingered, offering their reticent good-byes, she was content to let Pronaszko reclaim his flock.
By the end of the week, her clothes lay strewn over the lumpy bed and the wingback chair, ready for packing. She knew that when she returned to New York, she would remember that chair like a floating object in a Chagall painting. In its arms she would always find either the naked Marek or the proud Freidl. She snapped a Polaroid of it and held it, side by side, with the studio picture of her grandpa Isaac and Hillel.
Now all that remained was the trip back to Zokof. She had not seen much of Marek after the last performance. He’d had several engagements with his group, but he’d made a short detour to Kielce to check ukasz Rakowski’s masonry work on the new gravestone. Late that night, he had left with the desk clerk at her hotel a batch of Polaroids he’d taken with her camera. “Almost finished,” he’d written on the outside. The photos showed the new inscription that she had written. Ellen had been thrilled at the meticulousness and creativity of ukasz Rakowski’s work.
A few days later, Marek picked her up at the hotel.
“It seems like forever since I saw you,” she said.
He smiled, brushing his hand along the soft folds of her blouse. “I have the stone in the trunk. It is wrapped many times around, to make it safe.”
Ellen had thought they would be picking it up along the way in Kielce. Excited that the finished gravestone was in her reach, she asked to see it.
“We should wait,” Marek said. “It will be better to see it again when it is where it belongs. That will be more respectful, I think, than to open it here in the street.”
He looked so earnest, and he had put so much time and effort into getting the stone made, she couldn’t refuse him. “Okay. I can wait.” She kissed him and got into the Fiat.
Inside, he reached into the backseat and grabbed some newspaper clippings and a magazine.
Ellen saw a challah, loosely wrapped in paper, lying there. “Did you get that at the Ariel Café?” The little restaurant where they met was already evoking nostalgia.
He handed her the reviews. “Look at these first. Then I will tell you about the bread.” He put the car in gear and negotiated the narrow streets of Old Town toward the Planty.
Ellen slid her seat as far back as it would go and put her feet up on the dashboard. She scanned the reviews even though they were in Polish. “Pronaszko told me we got a good review in the Catholic weekly paper.” She fanned herself importantly with the reviews. “I’ve become his new personal saint.”
Marek pointed to the illustrated magazine in her lap. “Then let him pray that you will accept his commission for a new piece. Look at the article they wrote in Przekrój. This is a very popular weekly magazine here. And did you see that one from the Gazeta Wyborcza? That is a major national paper.”
“I know. Pronaszko went completely berserk when he brought it in. Their reporter came to the dress rehearsal and asked me a couple of questions about modern dance and our staging. But I didn’t think he was particularly interested in what we were doin
g.”
“Well, he was interested. He calls it ‘a passionate prayer for Polish Jewish relations.’”
Ellen held up the Gazeta Wyborcza article. Its accompanying photograph showed her dancers facing each other under the wedding canopy, the Freidl figure overhead in the tree. She examined it for some sign of Freidl’s departing soul and, despite her better judgment, felt disappointed when she couldn’t see it. “You’ll have to translate these for me later,” she said. “Tonight?”
“Of course, tonight.” He grinned at her.
They were almost on the Radom road when she asked him about the challah in the backseat.
“About three or four days ago, I received a letter from Rafael,” he said.
Ellen was surprised, and slightly hurt, that Rafael would write to Marek and not to her.
“He gave me the name of a woman in Pul١wy, not far from Zokof, who knows old Jewish tunes from that area, including, he said, tunes by Aaron Birnbaum.”
She put her hand to her mouth at hearing Aaron Birnbaum’s name.
“Rafael said he and this woman in Pul١wy have not been in contact since the old days. She was living in Israel, but someone told him that recently she returned to Poland with her brother.”
“Someone?” Ellen asked, immediately suspecting Freidl.
Marek pulled the car to the side of the road. Producing Rafael’s letter from his pocket, he translated it for her. She could see the handwriting was askew, as if penned with great difficulty. The letter read, “I have again been reminded by one whose wisdom I cannot question that our faith teaches, according to his deeds does God’s presence rest on a man. And so I send you the address of Sarah Gutman, who, God willing, will help you in your research.”
Marek read silently down the page and reported to a perplexed Ellen, “He says Sarah Gutman came back here against her children’s wishes. She said she wants to die at home.” He looked at Ellen, clearly pleased that Sarah Gutman called Poland home.
“Yesterday, I went to Pul١wy to see her, and she sang me tunes I never heard before. They gave me, I think, a special inspiration. What I heard are those voices we are missing in Poland. I tried to tell her this. It was very surprising to her. When I asked if I could make a recording, she was very happy. She said she thought she would never live to see such a thing as someone like me. So she fed me poppy-seed cake, and all afternoon she sang to me and I recorded everything. She baked that challah for me to take to Rafael, to thank him for sending me to her.”
Ellen bit her lip, knowing how filled with memories challahs were for Rafael. “And you let me go on about my reviews instead of telling me about this first?”
He laughed. “What does it matter, when?”
She smacked him playfully on the arm. “You’re unbelievable.” Opening the window, she remembered their first dinner at the Ariel Café, how he’d told her his grandmother thought the spice was gone in Poland. She believed now what she could not believe then, that this feeling of loss was genuine, and as complicated as the Jewish roots of Christianity itself. “Let’s have dinner at the Ariel Café tonight,” she said. They hadn’t eaten a meal together there since that evening.
“That will be perfect, yes.”
A humid wind blew back her hair, sprinkling her with the first drops of the morning rain.
By the time they arrived at Rafael’s doorstep, the rain had slowed to a drizzle. Ellen remembered how nervous she had been the day she first stood at that peeling painted door trying to imagine what sort of a man she was about to meet. She was no less nervous now.
When Rafael opened the door, her throat tightened at the sight of him. He seemed much frailer, even smaller somehow. His rich brown eyes were watery and dull. They became teary when Marek presented Sarah Gutman’s challah. “From Sarah Gutman, I know it is kosher,” he said, trying to make light of his emotion. “But now I want we should go to Freidl’s grave.” He did not refuse Ellen’s arm down the steps.
They drove through town, where many bright flower bouquets had recently been laid before the war memorial. At the corner of the main square, a man holding a plastic bag of groceries gave Ellen the by now familiar Zokof stare.
Marek shifted gears, braked for pedestrians, and appeared utterly absorbed in the business of driving.
Rafael looked off and said nothing.
Ellen guessed he was probably thinking of Freidl.
Just shy of the entrance to the cemetery, Marek parked the car. “What do you think?” he asked brightly.
Ellen and Rafael looked out the window at the rising piles of stones that had begun to define the entryway of the cemetery. “You’ve been building the wall!” Ellen cried.
Rafael stared with obvious surprise.
“I have been coming here on those days we did not have rehearsals,” Marek told them. “I always begin my time here by gathering more stones. So, I will meet you inside at Freidl’s grave.” He got out of the car and hurried across the rutted dirt road into the forest. Ellen did not protest his leaving, knowing they would soon be unveiling the gravestone together.
When he was gone, she leaned forward apprehensively. “Rafael, where is Freidl?”
His body slumped, and it seemed an effort for him to turn even slightly in his seat to look at her. She saw a tremor in his fingers, fatigue and melancholy on his face. He looked down at his hands and covered one with the other.
“Are you feeling all right?” she asked.
His sour breath hung in the close air of the car. The heat was becoming oppressive. Ellen was worried. “Let’s go over to the trees.”
Without answering, he opened the door and slowly got out, leaning on the doorjamb as he straightened. Together, they made their way across the road into the shade of the forest, where he sat down heavily on the fallen trunk of a large tree. The air was still. Ellen sat on the ground next to him. Flies buzzed along the top of the lichen-patched stone that lay half buried between them.
Ellen tried again. “Rafael, where is Freidl?”
To her amazement, he produced her grandpa Isaac’s handkerchief from his pocket. “She is gone. Even I do not know where. In my last dream there was only the tune.” He dried his eyes carefully, the way her grandfather used to at the Seder table on Passover.
It struck Ellen that grief was what had so diminished him. Here was a man who had sacrificed almost fifty years of his life to tend a grave and the soul of the woman whose body lay there. For such vigilance, he had lived as a stranger in his own town, where his intellect was untapped and unappreciated. He had become an old man, and now, suddenly, he was truly alone. Watching the difficulty with which he moved, Ellen could not help thinking of how it would be for him in the hours of his death, helpless and alone, peered at as a curiosity by his neighbors. That she would not be in Poland when that time came filled her with sorrow and shame. “I know you’ll miss her. I’m so sorry,” she consoled him. It was a pitifully inadequate thing to say.
He sniffed. “For what should you be sorry? The stones are gone. You made an opening for her to return.”
She hardly knew what to say. “I-I did?” she stammered.
Rafael planted his heel in the moist earth. Its scent blossomed upward. “Elleneh, you knew her. She was a woman of valor, but stiff-necked about her troubles. I have learned in my life that despair is its own kind of solace. It becomes a home that is not so easy to leave. You asked her what she wanted in the world. A simple question. A child’s wisdom is also wisdom.” He bent toward her and gave her a paternal pat on the shoulder. “But for a woman who stood apart from her community, who would not do what she said she came to do, such a question made her soul wither. You made her afraid. For love of you, she wanted to answer your question. But for this, she had to leave that terrible blue home, the despair. Understand?”
He rubbed his hands together. Ellen could see they were still trembling.
“She was angry at me.”
“Of course she was angry. You had made for her an opening but a dif
ficult one. We do not want to close our eyes and slip into eternity if we have not done what we said we came to do. You made her see.”
“She said I couldn’t make an opening for her. She said my soul was too small and unnourished.” Even repeating the words hurt Ellen.
Rafael shook his head. “Not so small that you did not fulfill your promise to her.”
“What did I do?” she said in bewilderment.
“You know what. This dance you made. This mishegoss, some would say, beating a timbrel in front of the goyim, giving a Polack a shofar to sound the awakening Tekiah! But all of it you made with the right heart, what we call kavonah! Listen, my shayneh, you made a prayer for her that redeemed her in the eyes of God. As the Baal Shem Tov said, the dance of the Jew is a prayer.”
He reached out and patted her again. “Thanks God it’s finished here. I am the last.”
“But you’re not the last,” Ellen said mischievously. “And it’s not finished here, or you wouldn’t have written to Marek about Sarah Gutman. You meant for him to come and hear her songs and taste that challah he brought you. It seems to me you’re planting seeds to make something grow here.”
Rafael regarded her with a mixture of amusement and skepticism. “Maybe you know more than me. It is a wise woman who hears one word and understands two.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 42