A Day of Small Beginnings (64 page)

“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.

B
y 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 difficult 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.”

“Thanks,” she said. “But before we move on, I want to say good-bye to her.”

Rafael wagged a scolding finger. “Say your good bye at the grave. Say El Molei Rachamim. But the rest, that
is
finished. She will not come to you again in dreams. Remember her, but do not call for her.”

His vehemence unnerved her. “Why not?”

“Because it is written, ‘Do not turn your face to ghosts, even of favorable spirits do not inquire. They will defile you.
Turn only to your God.’” His face had a tense, hard look. “‘Turn to your compassionate God.’” The anger and sarcasm in his
voice were undeniable.

“How can you tell me not to turn to ghosts when it was you who brought her to me?”

Rafael looked down at his dusty, worn shoes. “Because I am not a good Jew. Even your grandfather knew not to turn to her.
It was to God he prayed for mercy, not to a woman one year in her grave. A Jew’s duty is to life.”

Ellen’s face flushed. “You are a shayner Yid. There is no more beautiful Jew, no one like you, and there will never be anyone
like you.”

“Do not praise me as the people praised Moses,” said Rafael, scowling. “What kind of Moses am I who has no one to lead?”

“No one? You led four. My grandfather, my father, me, and Marek. It’s enough for us.”

Rafael looked utterly shocked.

Somewhere in the forest Marek let out a whoop of joy.

“He’s going to ruin his musician’s hands building that wall for you,” Ellen said.

Rafael nodded helplessly. With Ellen’s help, he hoisted himself up. “Well, let us go see your langer loksh then,” he managed
to say.

Together they walked toward the entrance of the cemetery. When they reached it, Ellen saw that the path had been swept of
all liquor bottles and trash. To the right of the entryway, a wooden structure, like a birdhouse with the front side open,
had been planted. Inside, a typed piece of paper had been sealed to the back wall behind a sheet of glass. She stepped closer
and was astonished at what it said, in Polish and in English: In Memory of the Jews of Zokof, Who Have Resided Here Since
1554.

As they entered the cemetery, Rafael said nothing about the memorial, but Ellen could see that he was moved. They reached
the lamppost and found Marek climbing a shallow embankment on the western side of the cemetery. He looked gleeful as a child,
clutching a large, muddy, flat stone.

“This is from the old wall! I found it in the riverbed,” he called. The knees of his pants were muddied and torn. “It is wet
down there,” he said, wiping himself off.

Ellen smiled at the thought of water running in the riverbed again. It seemed a good sign. “Your memorial out there is beautiful.
Thank you,” she said, pointing toward the entrance to the cemetery.

“I did it in memory of my Uncle Leszek,” he said shyly.

The three of them tramped the short distance to the place where Freidl’s little pile of stones lay.

Marek smiled secretively at Ellen. “I have to get something from the car,” he said, and bounded off again.

The songs of sparrows and starlings drifted into the cemetery from outside. Rafael looked at the pile of stones and, almost
imperceptibly, began to rock forward and back. “I want you should know something,” he said. “Years ago, Freidl told me that
if the day should come that her soul rests again with her body, she wanted I should be buried next to her when my time came.
I protested. I told her a man and a woman do not lie side by side in the grave. How would it look? I was a stranger to her
in life. I was a small child when she went to her death.”

Despite the solemnity of the subject, Ellen was amused by his sense of propriety. “What did Freidl say?” she asked.

“She said better she should lie with a wise man in hell than at her fool husband’s feet in paradise.”

Now Ellen grinned.

Slowly, so did Rafael.

They were laughing when Marek reappeared, struggling with the long cloth covered object in his arms, looking at them quizzically.

“We have something we want to show you,” Ellen said as Marek set the heavy object down against the tree and pulled the cloth
from its surface.

Rafael’s face went pale, and Ellen thought for a moment that this might have been too much for him. “You brought it back,”
he said. His voice was gruff with emotion as he pointed to the top of the gravestone that he had given to her father to take
to America.

“It belongs here.”

“You put it with the part from Głowacki.” He could barely get the words out. It seemed difficult for him to focus on anything
but the reunited gravestone, now contained within a stone frame. Between its two original parts was a newly engraved section.
łukasz Rakowski had decorated Ellen’s inscription with a carved bookcase, a fish swimming against an oncoming stream, and
a timbrel. Small metal swirls, resembling sparks, were embedded in the background.

Rafael squinted at the new section. “What did you write there? It is difficult for me to see it,” he said.

“It’s in English, but I also had the rabbi at the Lauder Foundation in Warsaw translate it into Hebrew. See?” She pointed
nervously at the writing. “I’ll read it to you.”