A Day of Small Beginnings (41 page)

The royal authority, weakened by conflicts with the gentry, could not always prevent the hostile legislation of the city magistracies.
Thus at Posen the limits of the ghetto were strictly defined; only forty-nine houses were allowed to the Jews, so that it
became necessary to raise the height of many dwellings by additional stories. The magistracy of Warsaw refused to admit Jewish
settlers, and Jewish merchants, visiting the city on business, could not tarry longer than two or three days.

The warfare of the Catholic clergy against Reformers and Anti-Trinitarians, led by the bigoted Nuncio Ludovico Lippomano,
incidentally resulted in turning the battle against the Jews. The usual weapon was seized upon. A rumor was set afloat that
Jews of Sochaczev had procured a sacred wafer and desecrated it by stabbing it until it bled. Before the king could intervene,
three Jews and their supposed accomplice, a Christian woman, were burned at the stake. The Jewish martyrs stoutly professed
their innocence, protesting that the Jews do not believe that the host is the divine body nor that God has either body or
blood (1556).

Ellen put down the book and stared at the wall, stunned by the thought that Jewish ghettos had existed in Poland so long before
the Nazis. As for desecrating the host, she couldn’t understand what this was all about. That Jews could be killed for a Christian
ritual that had no meaning to them seemed to her more a sign of a Christian need to assert power and dominion. But to what
end she could not imagine. Why did they care so much about Jews? Why go through such irrational religious posturing? This
bothered her so much, she found it difficult to fall asleep. People who don’t think things through logically are dangerous,
her father always said.

“Dad, I miss you,” she whispered.

In the night I came to her, covered with my plaid blanket. I sat in the big chair by her bed, like a living person; and knew
I had to speak to her, to strengthen her nerve.

“My eyesight is not so good,” I began. “These days, twos and threes I see of everything. But a shayna maidel, a beautiful
girl, I can recognize.” My voice was not my own, a clatter of high and low pitches, but I thought she could hear me. She had
opened her eyes.

I pointed at the book of history on the table by her bed, the one she had been reading. “A lot of narrishkeit the goyim have
said about us,” I told her. “No one can deny it. But, shayna, better you should fill your head with the words of Rabbi Nachman
of Bratslav, than your heart with such an anger. Rabbi Nachman said you should put your anger in your pocket and take it out
only when you need it. What do you need with such anger? All of life is a struggle. So?”

She was looking at me, a little bewildered, I thought. “I am here,” I said. “Yes, your eyes do not trick you.” She said nothing.
I suggested it wouldn’t hurt that she study a little Talmud and Torah, like I did at my father’s knee, may the Almighty preserve
his name.

She seemed to smile. “My father studied with me,” she said in a child’s voice, not her own.

But I did not care to speak of Nathan Linden, who had betrayed my trust.

“I understand,” I said. “A terrible loss, your father.”

“Can you talk to him?” Again, the child’s voice. The girl could break my heart.

“Talk to him? I am talking to you. That is all I can do.”

But I could not ignore her obvious unhappiness at my answer. “Your father is not here,” I explained. “Maybe others are together,
but I am alone. That is my share.”

“You never see anyone else?” she asked, not without sympathy.

“Once,” I told her. “My father came to tell me I should be vigilant.” I did not know what more to tell her than this. “Stop
torturing yourself already,” I said. “I saw you at the shul. That girl with the shoes. I saw.”

She looked off, sad but thoughtful.

I wanted she should understand me. I said, “Who knows, even when life is past us, what it was God intended? I myself might
have been a mother in my lifetime. I took my regret at my childlessness with me to the grave. And yet, had I children, as
God had commanded, the Smoke and Fire would have been their fate. That girl with the shoes could have been my
yiches,
my legacy. What am I to think of this? I will tell you. I think at the end of tragedy, there is a story, and a story needs
a storyteller. Maybe someone like you, from the outside, can tell it best.”

Her mind was elsewhere, I could tell. I said, “He’s a
langer loksh,
this Marek of yours.”

“What?” she said.

Now I had her attention. “A long noodle, what we call a tall, thin person. But I will admit this is a good looking boy, a
kind face. About him you shouldn’t worry. Of course, it would be better for us both if he was
frum.”

“Frum?”

She never heard this word? What kind of Jewish girl does not know even that much? “Frum
,
what you call observant, religious,” I said.

She seemed to understand me. I said, “Also with your grandfather I had this problem, to find a frummer mensch to take him
under his wing. I said then, and I say now, if you can’t have both, take the mensch. This boy Marek is a mensch, like Hillel
was a mensch.” I gave her a nod. “Another day he’ll take you to Zokof,” I said. But she stopped me there.

“Were you the one who sang the tune to Marek?”

It seemed she did not know what was what at all. I tried not to worry myself. I said, “I sing the tune always. Your langer
loksh heard it, that is all.”

“But why a tune, why not speak to him?” she insisted.

“With what word, what language?” I asked her. “Polish? Jewish? A tune everyone understands. A tune is like the apple your
old
bubbe
cut for you in pieces just the size of your mouth. It makes you cry, because she is gone and you miss her.”

I gave her time to think about this. “A tune touches the heart.” I put my hand to where my breast had once been flesh. The
lantern appeared between us. Its brightness grew, until the white light blotted us out to each other. I knew she was trying
to see my face again, to look around the light. But it was impossible. I was being drawn back into the blue.

Quick, a last word, I thought. “Ellen, you should understand, before the Smoke and Fire most of the Jewish people in the world
lived in this country.” My voice sounded thick to me now. It echoed in the room.

She looked alarmed. I wanted to calm her, but I did not know how much longer I would be able to remain with her.

E
llen awoke with a start and lay rigid for some time. She had had a dream, that much she knew. There was a voice, a woman,
or an idea of a woman in a blanket. There had been conversation, snatches of which she began to recall. She was sure Freidl,
the gravestone Freidl, was the woman. But she couldn’t piece it together. In frustration, she half rose and reached for the
telephone to call her father. When she remembered that he too was gone, she rolled over and wept.

31

A
T NINE THE NEXT MORNING, A MIDDLE AGED MAN WITH A RECEDED
chin and a sallow complexion introduced himself to Ellen in the hotel lobby. “I am Krzysztof, your driver,” he said. He pointed
to the small Renault outside the window, as if to offer proof of his profession.

She shook his hand, told him she appreciated his being on time, having by now observed that punctuality was not a Polish trait,
and asked him a few questions about the route to Zokof. “I need to be back here by late afternoon,” she said, heeding her
mother’s warning to leave the town before dark. “No problem,” Krzysztof assured her. Ellen wondered why Europeans found this
phrase so attractive.

She slipped into the front seat of the Renault. Within ten minutes they were out of the city. The light-green hills and meadows,
the scattered, sunken thatched huts, would have enchanted her had the car not been permeated with the sour smell of Polish
cigarettes and Krzysztof’s sweat. She rolled down her window. There was no point in trying to make conversation. It had soon
become apparent that Krzysztof’s English was limited, and in any case, he seemed rather withdrawn.

Squinting into the wind, she remembered Freidl’s advice not to focus so much on the Smoke and Fire, but she couldn’t resist
imagining Nazis streaming across the sunny striped fields. The phrase
Smoke and Fire
lent her a comfortable sense of insulation between the past and the bright, normal looking present.

Twenty minutes after they’d passed the tall cement high-rises of Radom, the sight of Zokof township’s black-and-white road
sign made her nervous to be entering her grandfather’s hometown and finally meeting Rafael.

When they arrived minutes later, Zokof was not the charming hamlet she had hoped for. Even the onion dome and the long, graceful
spire of the church on the town square could not soften the dilapidated impression made by the surrounding uncut, haphazard
grass and the cement apartment buildings, with their raggedy laundry hanging from the balconies. She wondered if the town
had been this depressing in her grandfather’s day.

Krzysztof parked in front of a pharmacy on the square. Ellen pulled her bulky backpack onto her shoulder and then unfolded
the rough map to Rafael’s house that her father had sent her the week before he died. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” she
said as she got out of the car. Krzysztof nodded with the amiable indifference of a man whose services had been hired for
the day.

Her English attracted the attention of one of the pharmacy’s customers, an ill shaven man in a threadbare jacket, who came
outside, right up to the car’s front bumper, to stare at the newcomers. Ellen evaded him, but as she proceeded around the
square, she became increasingly aware of other people’s stares—some sidelong, others with a certain lack of expression, which,
to her, seemed excessively cold. She remembered how she had mocked her father when he had told her how in China, surrounded
by hundreds of people craning to see his Occidental face, he had not experienced the sense of threat he’d felt in Zokof.

She quickened her pace. A block south of the square, away from the noise and the stares, she stopped to look again at the
map. A white-haired woman, perhaps in her sixties, approached her. She carried a basket of eggs on her arm, the handle buried
in the folds of a heavy knitted sweater.

“
Przepraszam
—excuse me.” Ellen showed her the map.

“Tak, tak, tak.”
The woman adjusted her clear rimmed glasses and chucked her head agreeably. But when she looked at Ellen, her pinched brows
suggested she had no idea what the map meant.

“Rafael Bergson?” Ellen ventured.

The woman brightened. “
Pan Bergson ten żyd?”

“Tak,”
Ellen said, startled that the woman had appended
Jew
to Rafael’s name.

Speaking rapidly in Polish, she took Ellen’s arm and led her across the street, down an alley, and up to the front door of
a battered wooden house. Ellen recognized the red-orange color her father had described. The paint was blistering and peeling.
Around the foundation, whole sheets of siding had been eaten away.

“Here is Mr. Bergson’s house,” the woman chirped in Polish.

“Dziekuje!”
Ellen thanked her.

“Prosze Prosze”
The woman bobbed her head again and continued on her way. But when Ellen glanced back at her, she saw the woman had stopped
three doors down and was watching her intently. It made her nervous. She knocked on the door, hoping Rafael would answer quickly.
When he didn’t respond, she began to worry that maybe he hadn’t received her letter. Maybe he wasn’t home. She might have
to wander around Zokof alone and return another day.

The sagging house did, in fact, seem shut. The white curtain sheers were drawn, the windows closed despite the warmth of the
day. She fidgeted with the strap of her backpack and shuffled her feet on the worn boards that served as a doorstep, nervous
too at how he would receive her if he was home after all.