A Day of Small Beginnings (33 page)

“I’ll stay close.” Ellen smiled, delighted she’d be going to Poland with his blessing after all.

T
hree weeks later, he was dead.

On December 21, more than three hundred people attended the service for her father at Harvard’s Memorial Church, many of them
arriving in Cambridge from all over the United States and abroad. In the entryway, they filed past the enlarged photographs
of Nathan, including the one where he posed, in his ascot and trench coat, with President Carter, and one of him reading in
the hammock at the Adirondacks house.

In lieu of a rabbi, Ellen and her mother had asked several friends, colleagues, and former students to speak at the gathering.
Each recalled a slightly different aspect of the man. Nathan the champion of law as social policy; Nathan the friend of foreign
students; Nathan the no-sense-of-direction tour guide in Cappadocia, Turkey. From Ellen, they heard about Nathan the father,
who taught himself to ice skate—badly—so that she, an only child, would always have a partner.

Afterward, the family took the urn with his ashes to Mount Auburn Cemetery and buried it in a shallow hole below a modern
abstract sculpture. Her mother politely refused her father’s old friend Mort Grinberg’s offer to recite Kaddish. “Nathan wasn’t
a believer. Why be hypocritical?” she said.

Ellen hadn’t disagreed. But she felt the absence of ritual at the burial site, as if they had not done right by him somehow,
that the job of laying him to rest was unfinished.

Later, when they all returned home, she excused herself and went upstairs to her father’s study. She opened the cabinet with
the gravestone. Wedged next to it, she found a round Plexiglas canister on which a meadow scene had been painted. Inside was
a tightly sealed bag and a note addressed to Rafael. Seeing her father’s almost impenetrably tight script again brought tears
to her eyes. It read, “I am sure you will find my daughter Ellen a more winning student than I of your impressive body of
knowledge. Here at home, I am finding the meadow and planting a seed. In the meantime, I hope you both enjoy this sugar for
your tea.”

She took the canister and note from the cabinet, realizing he had intended her to take it to Poland. Underneath it, she found
a manila envelope containing several documents. They appeared to be some kind of trust account, with Rafael Bergson as the
beneficiary of a monthly stipend for the remainder of his life. She also found a paper, signed by her father, that seemed
to indicate that although he was the sole source of these funds, the beneficiary had been given to understand that they had
been collected from “elderly Bundists in America.” Her father, it said, preferred that this understanding not be corrected
in the event of his incapacity or death.

Although Ellen had no idea what
Bundists
were, she began to weep. “Oh, Dad,” she said, muffling her cry with her hand. She scanned the shelves for the two books she
had come to his study to retrieve.

“I want you to take a look at this book,” her father had said at the end of their last session. “It’s called the Tanakh, the
Jewish bible.”

She had taken the book from him hesitantly. “Why do you want to give this to me?” she had asked, believing a history of Poland
might have been more useful.

“Read it. You’ll recognize a lot of the stories. I think you’ll find it useful when you meet Rafael. Read the section called
Lamentations. You’ll be amazed. It’s pure poetry. Actually, I’ve been surprised at how much our orientation to the world is
based on this one book.” He had reached into the top drawer of his desk and taken out a blue booklet.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a prayer book. I picked it up at Sol Litvak’s funeral a few months ago. El Molei Rachamim is in here, the prayer for
the dead. You might want to recite it in the cemetery.”

She had opened the booklet. Next to the transliterations, it was filled with indecipherable Hebrew letters, punctuated by
dots and dashes. Her grandpa Isaac was the only one in the family who could read this stuff, she thought, and he had called
it crap—the Opiate of the People. She could still hear him saying it.

“Wouldn’t Grandpa go nuts if he knew we were reading this?”

“I’m not so sure,” her father said.

She had managed to forget to take either of the books home with her that day. Maybe, if she had to be perfectly honest, she
had done it on purpose. The idea of her father giving her religious books gave her the creeps. Now, with a terrible sense
of guilt, she gathered them both in her arms to take with her to Poland.

On the train ride back to New York, she wrote Rafael a letter informing him of her father’s death, and asking him if he would
meet with her when she arrived in Poland that summer.

25

I
N EARLY
J
ULY 1993,
E
LLEN LEFT FOR
P
OLAND.
S
HE AWOKE
during the descent to Warsaw’s Okecia Airport, eager to follow her father’s path into the city. She had even avoided looking
at photographs of Warsaw so that she could begin her trip by seeing what he had seen. At the baggage claim, she expertly bungee-corded her duffel to the top of her enormous wheeled suitcase, amused by the curious glances her blue cowboy boots were attracting.
Then she boarded the bus to the city center and took a window seat.

Her first impressions were not promising. Along the wide boulevard she saw imposing but unremarkable gray apartments, a dirty
glass-and-concrete building crowned with the yellow IKEA logo, and the strangely inert, fatigued faces of commuters in passing
red trolleys. By the time she was in view of the Palace of Culture and Science, she had jettisoned her father’s warnings and
had categorized Warsaw as one of those drab, if practical, cities populated by people dressed ten years out of date, but as
safe and bright as an electric bulb.

In the underground passageway leading to the Central Railway Station, she dropped a few dollars into the hat of a street musician
as a gesture of her goodwill to the country. Then she boarded the express train for the two and a half hour ride to Kraków.

From the doorway of her second-class compartment, an elderly couple observed her struggles as she stood on her seat, hauling
her luggage onto the rack.

“
Czesc.
Hello.” Ellen smiled down at them, glad to at last make use of her Polish language tape.

Rather doubtfully, the couple smiled back, then took their seats opposite as Ellen continued to push her bags into place.
The man’s shirt and jacket were worn, but his wool vest and wide tie lent him a certain old-fashioned propriety. He opened
his newspaper. His wife spread a white doily across the width of her prodigious lap and began to crochet, her thick fingers
moving with the unconscious assurance of habit.

Ellen took her seat and thumbed through one of her Polish tour books, hunting for information about the route from Warsaw
to Kraków. The book pictured a historic Poland, but when the train emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the Vistula
River, she was disappointed to find herself in an industrial area that more closely resembled Newark, New Jersey.

Not long after, she caught the elderly woman stealing glances at her. When Ellen smiled, the woman burst forth in a profusion
of Polish. Ellen looked at her regretfully. “
Nie mówie po polsku
—I don’t speak Polish,” she said. She opened her father’s Polish phrase book and gamely attempted to explain that she was
an American and that she was going to Kraków for two months.

The woman pointed at Ellen’s blue cowboy boots, which seemed to amaze her, and offered an apple.
Dziekuje bardzo,
Ellen thanked her, and in her best sign language, she admired the woman’s crochet work. The woman’s face flushed with pride,
and revealed a faded blue-eyed prettiness. They smiled at each other several more times and ate their apples. In pantomime,
the woman asked if Ellen had sewn the filmy green layered skirt she was wearing. She reached forward and fingered it approvingly
when Ellen nodded yes.

Soon after, Ellen closed her eyes and drifted off, dreaming of a misted forest filled with melodies, all in a minor key. The
pleasing romance of it lulled her to sleep.

When she awoke, the train was cutting across lush, soft hills dotted with black and white cows and lopsided, unpainted barns.
She saw wooden villages and farmers on horse-drawn wagons plowing oddly thin strips of land, bordered in the distance by the
delicate outline of birch trees. Utterly charmed, she felt her faith in her tour book’s Poland restored.

The elderly woman tapped her on the knee. Her husband had pulled bread and sausage from the basket planted between his feet.
He pressed some into her hand with an encouraging nod, and she accepted. “
Dziekuje, Dziekuje,
” she thanked him, and told him the food was delicious. She wondered how they saw her, an American girl, with her perfect
white orthodonture and the shadows under her “Linden family eyes,” as her mother called them, artfully covered by liquid concealer.

The woman somehow communicated they were going to visit their son, who lived in Nowa Huta, outside Kraków. Ellen showed them
her tour book and looked up the town, only to learn that Nowa Huta was an ecological disaster, a postwar steelworks built
by the communist government. “Over decades, Nowa Huta’s intensive industrialization has turned the region’s rivers into sewers
and filled the air with smog in nearby Kraków as well, where its gases and acid rain are methodically eating away at the city’s
stone,” the book said. She looked up at the couple’s expectant faces and smiled, not wanting to insult their civic pride.
“Nowa Huta,” she said, with growing concern at spending two months immersed in so much pollution. She pointed to the town’s
name in the book. Pronaszko certainly hadn’t mentioned the problem.

They passed a massive cross planted along the road, its base strewn with bunches of flowers. She wondered if there was a memorial
like that in Zokof for the Polish peasant her father said had died at her grandfather’s hand. She was glad she had not heard
this when her grandfather was alive. As it was, she had always suspected he’d had secrets. He’d been so difficult to know.
The way he turned serious questions about his life into jokes had always made her feel he was evading her, that he didn’t
trust her, or even that he was laughing at her for some reason.

But then, her father wasn’t exactly a trustworthy reporter either. He got so distracted by his own tension that he often misunderstood
facts and circumstances. Worse, he misread people. For all she knew, Rafael Bergson might just have been telling him some
local tall tale about the death of a peasant. She wanted to know the real reason he had given her father the gravestone. This
was what she meant to find out when she met him. The thought of it excited her. Turning from the window, she closed her eyes
again and was comforted by the gentle sway of the train.

By afternoon, the church spires of Kraków’s skyline rose like graceful fingers in the distance. As they drew closer, Ellen
was thrilled by the sight of its green copper and rust-colored roofs, and the stone facades. At the station, she said good
bye to the elderly couple and dragged her ridiculously heavy load from the platform. The hazy air had a distinctive burned
smell she could not identify. She assumed it was some vestige of Nowa Huta.

She found a driver to take her to her hotel. On the way, her concerns about pollution dissipated at the sight of so many architectural
collisions—medieval battlements beside stately eighteenth-century townhouses, domed churches nestled beside the Baroque exteriors
of stylish modern boutiques. The entire center of the city seemed to be surrounded by a greenbelt with benches and paths for
strolling. She sat back, happy to have found her way to a city of human scale, to a place more beautiful than anything she
had been led to expect.

The taxi slowed at a small square. Bright modern art posters hung from the buildings in marvelous juxtaposition to the stuccoed
friezes that decorated the eaves. Ellen sensed a tremendous free-floating creative energy about the place.