A Day of Small Beginnings (61 page)

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.

But when her tears subsided, it was with a sense of rebellion that Ellen spoke, in a still, quiet voice to the woman who had
entered her dreams and her memory. “My heart and my head hear you when you talk to me,” she said. “And however you manage
to do that, you have taught me something. You may not think it is enough, but I know better than you how you have touched
my heart.”

46

I
N THE LAST DAYS BEFORE THE PERFORMANCE,
E
LLEN AWOKE
with burning eyes that cold washcloths barely soothed. Her headaches often lingered until she fell asleep late at night.
At rehearsals, under the intense pressure of time running out, she exhorted the dancers to
do it bigger, deepen the movement, listen to what the music is saying! Go! Go! Go!

They had begun to show greater interest and engagement with the work. Individually or in groups, they would shyly tell her
they thought the dance was
spiritual,
although they never seemed to be able to elaborate. Ellen didn’t know how to interpret such praise. They did not try to explore
the Jewishness of it with her, but one afternoon, as she watched them, she was stunned to see tears in Monica’s eyes. Taking
her aside, she asked why.

“You cannot know what it is for us, to be able to show our faith in God’s power to make us grow,” Monica told her. “Thank
you.”

“Thank
you,
” Ellen said, struck by how like Freidl this Polish girl sounded, with her insistent hopefulness about God’s presence in the
world. Later that day, she stared at the dust motes floating aimlessly in the stray sunbeams shining through her hotel window
and thought, a God who commands that His creation grow, free of Him, might not be so stupid or naive an idea as her grandfather
and father had led her to believe. He starts us, we finish ourselves. There was a certain logical dignity in it. What seemed
wrong to her now was her grandfather’s rocket, stuck in an infinite universe that never grew, but merely
was. The universe, even if made of only inanimate objects, is expanding, always growing. That’s science, not stupidstition,
Grandpa,
she chided him. She wrote down what Monica had said about having faith in God’s power to make us grow and made a ritual of
rereading it every day, trying to cleave a God frame of mind to herself.

Marek began to bring dinner for the two of them to her room, leaving bags of fruit for her to eat the next day. In bed one
night, he ran his fingers over her ribs, telling her, “You are becoming too thin.”

She pulled away from him, not because she was ungrateful for his concern, but because combining love and worry had been her
father’s specialty. Tears formed. She brushed them off with the back of her hand.

“What is wrong?” Marek asked.

She didn’t want to talk about missing her father. “It’s just that staging a dance is always so intense at the end,” she said.
“I see what it should look like as a whole now, but if I don’t pull it together just right, it’ll fall apart.” They lay together
in silence for a while. “I’m just scared,” she said quietly, frightening herself even more by admitting it. “I could be building
this entire thing and it could be completely off and it’s too late to change it. There’s my nightmare.”

“Well, not tonight.” He cupped the back of her neck and gently massaged it with the tips of his fingers. “I will pray for
you to sleep without dreams.”

She wrapped her arms around his back and kissed him. “I’m sure God has better things to worry about than how I sleep.”

He pulled the covers over them both. “I think how you sleep is exactly what God worries about,” he said. Then he surprised
Ellen by singing her a melodic, slow song in Polish.

“What does it mean?” she asked him when he had finished.

“It says, ‘Let us remember the old carp in the river, the dun horse in the mist, and how when we who were in love, never slept.’”
He looked away with an expression that made Ellen uneasy.