A Day of Small Beginnings (21 page)

Horrified, Nathan tried to imagine the scene. “What about the children?”

“The youngest one recognized your father. He called out, ‘It’s Itzik Leiber!’ A terrible mistake. Terrible!” Rafael grimaced.
“The wife heard. ‘Itzik Leiber is the devil himself!’ she shouted. What could Itzik do? The Poles would come after
him
now, not the children. All three kinderlach were holding tight to his legs. ‘Run home safe,’ he told them. But they wouldn’t
let go of him. The wife took hold of Jan’s whip. No one waited for the blows. The children ran. Itzik ran. He jumped over
the cemetery wall.”

Nathan looked around for a wall, trying to imagine his slow, round Pop jumping over it like a hunted animal. But except for
the remnant on which Rafael had sat, there was no wall.

“He crawled on all fours over the graves, until he came to Freidl’s resting place over there.” Rafael pointed. “What made
him stop, I’m sure he himself couldn’t have said. He wrapped himself around her gravestone like he was trying to climb into
her arms.”

Nathan looked at the pile of stones to which Rafael pointed, intrigued but skeptical. “Couldn’t he just have been out of breath
and didn’t know where else to go?”

“Exactly, Leiber. Out of breath,” Rafael commended him, although Nathan didn’t know why.

Rafael placed his hands on his knees, much as Nathan himself placed his hands on a lectern. “In the Torah,” he began, “the
word
breath
is connected with the soul, with God Himself.” He smiled. “You are right. You
could
say he was out of soul, out of God, when he came to Freidl. He
didn’t
know where to go. So he stopped.”

Nathan recognized the teacher in Rafael appealing to him. But he couldn’t grasp what he was being expected to learn.

Rafael pouted slightly. “I will admit, it was not such a wonder that her stone fell over when Itzik put his arms around it.
A stone, newly unveiled and not so steady in the earth. Of course it fell. Broke in two pieces, as I said.”

Nathan fought not to show his disbelief. “Are you telling me the broken stone is a historical fact?”

“That’s right.” Rafael nodded with satisfaction. “After it broke, the Poles ran from the cemetery. Who knows, maybe they saw
a ghost?” His eyes widened with mock amazement, and his laugh was deep, gravelly as his voice, but oddly pleasing.

Nathan smiled, reassured that Rafael’s metaphysical beliefs had limits.

“Later, Itzik crept like a thief back to town. He went to the house of his employer, a rich miller who bought wheat from Jan
Nowak. Avrum Kollek was his name.” Rafael shook his head. “Avrum Kollek made your father beg for every zloty he gave him.
As if it weren’t a sin to shame the poor.”

Nathan took the studio photograph from his jacket, of his father as a boy. He tried to imagine all this. Begging took a willingness
to be vulnerable, an attitude wholly absent in Pop’s familiar defiant expression. Only fear for his family could have made
him bend so far against his nature. He looked down at his feet, ashamed for Pop.

A horn blasted twice from outside the cemetery. A moment later, it blasted again, then again.

Rafael looked over in the general direction of the noise. “It is your driver. He wants to go.”

“Well, he’ll have to wait. I’m not ready to go yet.” Nathan was surprised at his own vehemence. They waited for the horn to
stop. He could not get it out of his mind that Pop had really crawled on all fours in this cemetery. “You said he begged for
money?”

“For his mother, Sarah,” Rafael nodded. “Sarah, mother of Itzik. Strange, no? Another Sarah. Another Itzik. Another sacrificial
lamb. Poor woman, half dead already from hunger and overwork. And because of what happened that night, she had to leave Zokof
too.”

“With him?”

“No.”

“He left alone?”

Rafael nodded. By then, Nathan’s shoulder muscles were knotted so tightly they were causing him the kind of pain only Marion’s
massages could undo. He was gripped by the thought of his father losing his home and his family at the age of fourteen.

Rafael looked toward the car. Nathan looked at the old man’s worn shoes and realized that he needed the ride back to town.
He stood up. “I’ll go talk to him.”

“Nah. He’ll wait,” Rafael said brusquely. He picked up a dead leaf and rolled it gently between his fingers. “Sarah left Zokof
at dawn. By then, her other children were in danger. In those days, Leiber, Poland wasn’t so bad as Russia. They didn’t push
Jews into a Pale of Settlement and let them starve to death. But it was bad enough. It wasn’t safe for her to stay.”

Why the hell didn’t Pop tell me any of this? Nathan wondered. He rolled his shoulders, trying to stretch his tight back muscles.
“What about his employer, the miller? Couldn’t he have done something?” he asked irritably.

“I’m coming to that. After he sent Itzik off, Avrum Kollek went to the Russian magistrate and offered him gold, that he should
protect the Jews of Zokof. But there were sensitive matters involved with a local nobleman, and the Russian refused to send
a detachment of soldiers. The Poles knew what that meant. They made a pogrom like the Jews hadn’t seen for years. For his
trouble, Avrum Kollek himself fell under their boots. It took five men at least to hold him down while they pulled out his
beard, tied him up like a chicken, and put a trayf sausage in his mouth. They hung him, in front of his daughter, Shuli. Ach!
The things that were done here, you don’t know. You can’t imagine.”

Nathan got nauseous. “Did my father know what happened?”

“Nah, not until later. He heard there was trouble when he was already in Radom. How many details he got, I don’t know. All
night he’d been walking, hiding in ditches along the road, sleeping through the morning with his head on the bundle his mother,
may she rest in peace, packed for him. In his pocket he had a red ribbon his sister Hindeleh gave him from her hair.”

This last bit of information startled Nathan. “I found a ribbon in the strongbox where my father kept all his important papers.
It was tied around the photograph I just showed you. It was more pink than red. It must have faded. How did you know about
that ribbon? How do you know about any of this?”

“There are things I know, Leiber. Let’s leave it like that, for now,” Rafael said.

Overcome, and still grateful for all this information, Nathan was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, for now. “How
old was Pop’s sister Hindeleh?” he asked.

“Four. A little beauty. Thick red curls. And her face, a perfect oval. Light-brown eyes.”

“A Modigliani girl.” Nathan blurted one of his pet names for his Ellen.

Rafael shrugged. “The only Leiber who returned to Zokof after the pogrom was Gershom, the eldest boy. But that was years later.”

Nathan stared, literally open-mouthed, at Rafael. “Did you know my father’s brother?”

“Of course I knew him. A sickly man. A bachelor. He showed up around 1930 and went to work for Chaim the Baker’s son. Kept
to himself. Slept on the flour sacks at the bakery. Spent all his spare time in shul, though his beard was always covered
with flour. The families took turns inviting him to
Shabbos
dinner.”

This wasn’t enough for Nathan. “What else do you remember about him?”

Rafael brushed a fallen leaf from his shoulder. “It is written, the less a man talks, the nearer he is to holiness. If so,
your uncle Gershom was a holy man.” He raised his bushy eyebrows ironically. “He was the last Jewish baker in Zokof. Bread
like his will never be made again here—pumpernickel, rye.... Oy, for a taste of one of Gershom’s
challahs.
The Poles don’t know from making egg bread.”

Nathan vowed he’d find a way to get Rafael a challah. “My father used to say no one in America knows how to make bread either.”

Rafael smiled. A squirrel chattered and scampered through the underbrush.

“You were saying, about Gershom?” Nathan prompted.

“From Gershom we learned what happened to Itzik Leiber’s family.”

“So Gershom was the one who told you what happened to my father that night?” This made sense to Nathan, and he was relieved
at the logical explanation.

“Nah, from Gershom I know what happened to Itzik’s
family.
They went through forests and towns. They hid from the authorities who were looking for Itzik. In Lublin, he said, they went
to the Old Cemetery, the one that’s high on the hill. They pushed
kvitls
under stones around the Seer of Lublin’s grave. You’ve heard of him, maybe. They called him ‘the Iron Head.’”

Nathan shook his head, no.

“They called him that because he had the
Gemara,
the whole thing, in his head, like an encyclopedia. Gershom wrote the kvitls on thin slips of paper he found along the road,
all their prayers for Itzik’s safety, for some shelter and food. About this, he was poetic. He said the kvitls fluttered like
butterfly wings until the rain came and pinned them down, erasing the letters drop by drop.”

Rafael looked at the sky. “Many times I myself have wondered, does God read these messages? If He does, how could He have
been so indifferent to the fate of this poor woman and her children? And what of the Seer of Lublin? Even with those famous
eyes—they say he had one much bigger than the other, and that they saw through time and space—did they see Sarah Leiber?”
He shook his head. “She wandered east toward Chelm and died of a fever.”

Nathan shrank inside. “My grandmother died on the road?”

Rafael nodded.

“What happened to Hindeleh?”

“Taken to a Jewish orphanage in Chelm.”

Nathan tore at the bark of the tree. “What about the other children?”

“As it is written, they were scattered like straw that flies before the wind.”

Even in his anguish, Nathan was taken with the poetic phrase and wondered if it was biblical. “Did any of them come back to
Zokof after the war?” he asked.

“Nah. The war swept us all away from here. They didn’t come back.”

Nathan looked at the photograph of his father again and wondered what had happened to Hindeleh. How could it be that a faded
hair ribbon was all that was left of a person, that it could remain intact years after she had disappeared? It was enough
to make a man regard faith in a Supreme Eye on the world as something too painful to share with his children. Maybe that’s
what Pop had thought. Nathan imagined him alone in his window, silent except when he talked back to the radio, silent as he
read his socialist newspaper. Not like his holy brother Gershom. Just silent because that was all he had to say about God.

He ached for his father now, ached that they’d lost their chance to speak plainly with each other about Zokof, just as he’d
ached for years that he couldn’t apologize to him for having made such a travesty of his funeral service. It turned his stomach
to think of it.

Rafael stood up. “Come. It’s time to pray.”

Nathan looked around the unmarked cemetery. “I don’t know how to pray. I don’t know what is really even meant by
God,
” he said, surprised that he was ashamed to admit this. “After my father died, I never even visited his grave because I didn’t
know what I’d do when I got there. Is that a sin?”

“What do you think?”

“I thought it wouldn’t make a difference to him anymore, if I came or not. He was gone.”

“But it made a difference to you. Why does a man pray, Leiber? To ask God to produce presents for him like a magician, or
that He should grant wishes? This is for children!”

Nathan was impressed.

“A man prays so he can speak to his own still small voice. He prays to make
himself
change. In the beginning, the words mean nothing. Imagine a boy in the back of a shul, without a prayer book, reciting the
Hebrew alphabet. When asked why, he says, ‘I don’t know how to pray, so I’m offering God the letters. I hope He will arrange
the words.’”

The parable appealed to Nathan as an academic, and he smiled appreciatively.

“A man who spends his life working at those letters can learn to arrange the words himself. And if he needs help, he turns
to the prayers of his fathers and they become a minyan, reciting as one voice across centuries.”

“And what if he doesn’t believe in the words?”

“Then he asks God for help—like your father, that night in the cemetery.”

Nathan quickly took issue with this. “My father didn’t believe in prayers. He didn’t believe in God.”

“Listen to me, Leiber. Your father believed. He lit a holy spark inside himself in this cemetery, the spark of man touching
God. It was nothing less than that. Understand?”

“With all due respect,” Nathan insisted, “what you call a holy spark is what I would call a moment of inspiration. There’s
no need for God in the picture.”

Rafael smiled indulgently. “Inspiration without understanding to sustain it lasts as long as a bubble of soap. The understanding
that lasts is when a man realizes God’s presence in the world. A man who is touched by such understanding is changed, not
for an hour or a day, but for a lifetime. He has crossed the bridge to what we call having the proper
kavonah
—paying attention to the meaning and the direction of one’s prayer.”

“I’m not sure I’d ever be constitutionally able to recognize the presence of God,” Nathan said, in his most professorial manner.
“It goes against my whole rationalist orientation toward life. Awe at natural beauty is about as far as I go.”

“So, maybe for you it will be more difficult. So?”

“So, if I pray, I guarantee you it will be gibberish to me today and gibberish ten years from today, no matter how many times
I say the words. To me, the prayers will always just be words, conversations with myself, at best. But there’s no God in that.”

Rafael smiled again. “And you are so sure that nothing could ever change your
orientation,
as you call it? You are the measure of all things and you are immovable? I can only say, if this is so, Leiber, then you
have a problem bigger than not being able to pray. You live in a very small world that allows only for small wonders.”