16

THE TWO OR THREE FEET OF STONE WALL TO WHICH RAFAEL HAD pointed had almost been reclaimed by lichen and moss. Rafael seated himself slowly and tamped the earth to set his footing. His black shoes were dirty and scuffed. The rays of the noontime sun shone on his long black coat, revealing that it too was worn. Nathan glanced at the cuffs, the unraveling threads and the frayed material beneath, and could hardly stand to imagine what it would be like to live as an uncared-for man.

“There is a story they tell in Zokof about a farmer called Jan Nowak,” Rafael began, his voice gruff but vigorous. “The Nowaks were here since the days when they belonged to the landowners. Rough people, illiterates, you understand?”

Nathan understood. But he hoped Rafael would quickly get to the point because he was acutely aware that his time in the cemetery was being measured on Tadeusz’s clock.

“The Nowaks were not just another peasant family. Jan Nowak’s father, Karol, was famous all over Poland. One day, plowing his field, he said he heard a voice. It told him to go to the Tatra Mountains. This from a man who had never left Zokof in his life. But he went. When he came back to Zokof, he said the Virgin Mary appeared to him in the mountains. He said she gave him a wooden cross to wear around his neck. Naturally, people believed him.”

Nathan affected that special skeptical look he’d perfected from years of teaching.

“What, Leiber?” Rafael snapped at him. “So you don’t believe. A Virgin Mary and a cross is nothing by us. But let me tell you, a story like this you don’t dismiss either. It has a life of its own.”

Nathan hadn’t expected that his skepticism would so offend Rafael. “I’m sorry. Go on,” he urged, relieved to know Rafael understood that the story’s importance lay in its context, not in some literal belief.

“After Karol died, Jan wore the cross. One night, when Jan and his wife rode home in their wagon, people say he came upon the devil himself. Only that night, the devil was disguised as a fire inside a lantern—a lantern, I should tell you, carried by three Jewish children.”

The collision of the words devil and three Jewish children took Nathan by surprise. “What did you say?” he asked.

Rafael turned his attention to the tips of his scuffed black shoes. “It is said that the children danced around the lantern, called out prayers to the devil in tongues. Jan raised his whip. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,’ he said. Then he beat the children without mercy, until they dropped the lantern. Jan reached for it, to smash it and put out the evil flame. But the devil was too quick for him. He jumped from the fire and turned himself into a young Jew. The Jew grabbed Jan by the arm and threw him beneath the wheels of his own wagon. The horse bolted, pulled the wheels over Jan’s head, and killed him.”

Nathan thought this sounded like a Sholom Aleichem story. He was intrigued that Pop had really lived in a world like that. But he was also feeling edgy at the time being lost.

“All this time,” Rafael continued, “Jan’s wife stayed in the wagon. She said the Jew tore the cross from Jan’s neck. She said he spoke in the devil’s tongue and howled with joy when he broke the cross in half. Then he ran here to this cemetery.”

“Is this kind of story common in Poland?” Nathan asked.

Rafael glared at him. “Stop with the questions, Leiber, and listen to what I’m telling you.”

Chastened, Nathan held his tongue.

“When the people from town heard about Jan’s death, they gathered to avenge him. They lost their fear of the magicians buried below. They followed the sound of the boy’s howling to this cemetery. They looked everywhere, but the Jew had vanished. In his place, a menacing old Jewess appeared over her gravestone, which lay broken in two. She chased the townspeople from the cemetery. They say one brave peasant grabbed the top part of her gravestone, on which her name was written, and carried it out. He thought if he smashed the stone, he could destroy her. But the spirit pulled the stone from his arms. It fell into a stream, where it was covered with leaves and lost. They say that gravestone is why the stream dried up and that the old Jewess’s spirit is still here in Zokof.”

“That’s quite a story,” Nathan said patiently. “But what does it have to do with my father?”

“Quite a story, you call it? Yeh. Every mother and father in Zokof knows it by heart. To their children they say, ‘Watch out, the old Jewess will come for you in the night!’”

Nathan laughed.

But Rafael was angry. “What? You think this is some kind of game we’re playing here, Leiber? I read the papers from Warsaw. You American Jews come to Poland to dig around for roots. This is no museum for you to pretend everything is in the past. Let me tell you, nothing is past in Poland. For us, the past is more unfinished here than anywhere else. Here, every story has a consequence. Understand?” He rose unsteadily and rubbed his temples with both hands as he took a few steps in the tangled underbrush. “Oy, Gottenu,” he said, then sighed.

“Look,” Nathan said, “I don’t deny that people retell myths about their past, it’s just that I want to find out more about my father’s life.” But he was shaken at hearing the word Gottenu again. The last time he’d heard it was at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

Rafael wound his fingers into his beard. “Then listen to what I will tell you, Leiber. The boy, the one they say had the devil in him. Him, the Zokofers remember especially. His name was Itzik Leiber.”

Nathan stared. “My father?”

“Yes. He was here! Your father.”

“In this cemetery?”

“In this cemetery. On the night Jan died. Yeh. The only question to ask now is, is there any truth in it? I told you the Polish story. Now I will tell you the Jewish story, as it was told to me.”

Nathan, not knowing what else to do, sank onto the bough of the fallen tree and waited.

“The Jews always began the story like this.” Rafael held up his hands, as if about to conduct an orchestra. “When Itzik Leiber’s father abandoned his family, the boy drove the rabbis from his mother’s house. People said it was because the father, Mordechai the Ragman, beat his wife for the whole town to see, but made a tsimmes of his piety. In time, they called the boy Itzik the Faithless One.”

“That’s him!” Nathan said, proud that his father had earned a nickname in town, although he couldn’t imagine Pop actually throwing a rabbi out of the house. The man he knew ranted and railed against rabbis, put on a real performance for the family, but only behind closed doors.

Rafael again studied the tips of his shoes. “Everyone knew the Leibers didn’t have two kopeks to put together. But after Mordechai left, Itzik refused help for his family from the shul. Imagine!”

Nathan may have been shocked that his grandfather was a wife beater, but he was not surprised that his father would not take help from the shul. When Nathan was a boy, his father had refused help from the shul during a bakers’ strike. His mother had to accept the money in secret and put it into her “private account,” as she called it. Nathan had called it her “protection from Pop” money.

Rafael looked at him. “Now, my legal scholar from Harvard University, tell me, what should a Jew think of a man like Mordechai the Ragman, who boasts of his devotion to God but violates his obligation to his family?”

Nathan thought about it. “I’d think he was a hypocrite. But”—he frowned—“I’m not a religious man. It would be my guess that religious people would think his first obligation was to God.”

“Then they’d be fools, like your grandfather,” Rafael retorted. “Listen to me, Leiber, pride in piety is a sin in the eyes of God. A Jew’s obligation to his fellow man is higher than his obligation even to God! God is not diminished by your failure to observe His Sabbath or to keep a kosher home. If a man sins against his children, who is made unholy? God?”

“That’s a Jewish belief?” Nathan asked. He’d never given much thought to the relationship a man was supposed to have with God.

Rafael nodded. “There is a proverb. Proverb twenty two. It says, ‘Teach a child in the way he should go, and even when he grows old he will not depart from it.’”

Four or five caws echoed overhead. Rafael stroked his beard. “Mordechai Leiber practiced the worst kind of impiety,” he said. “He made his son hate God. A child learns more from deeds than words.”

“Actually, he made Pop an atheist,” Nathan said.

“Your father was no atheist, Leiber. He was angry. His father was a hypocrite. But he didn’t deny God.”

Nathan was incensed. “How do you know? He was my father. As long as I can remember he always said there is no God.” Of this, he was certain. But he was no longer sure what Pop may have secretly believed. The image of him slumped tearfully at the Seder table haunted him now. He put his finger on the bridge of his nose and adjusted his glasses, trying to ward off the sense that he had been dragged into a slow-motion, underwater world that was fissuring and crumbling the pillars of his life. He opened his mouth and tried to pull more air into his lungs. Deeds, not words, he thought. The word hypocrite kept coming back to him. When he was young, Pop used it so often he’d assumed it was Yiddish.

“What are you, a hypocrite rabbi?” Pop would say when he found the young Nathan lazing around the house on Saturdays.

“What’s wrong with a day of rest?” his son would say, defending himself. “You had one when you were a kid.”

“Rest? What rest? You think my father let me rest on that day? My father dragged me to the shul to sit with the alter kockers with garlic on their breath and chicken bones in their mouths. Even on Yom Kippur they ate the chicken bones.”

“Weren’t they supposed to fast on Yom Kippur, Pop?” Nathan would tease, knowing Pop would go for the bait.

“Of course they were supposed to fast. And the rabbis, the hypocrites, were supposed to love God. They davened plenty. A regular show they made with their praying. But while they were carrying on, they had their hands in hardworking people’s pockets.” Pop would slide his hand into Nathan’s pocket and grab his leg until he screeched, delighted at the unexpected attention. “Took money for schnapps, money to build shuls, to make themselves important. Bah!” And with that, Pop would retrieve his hand, snatch up his newspaper, and drop into the old brown upholstered chair by the window.

The lesson Nathan learned from these encounters was that making fun of rabbis was a sure way to please his father.

“I’m no hypocrite,” Pop had said a few years later, when his wife had insisted Nathan be called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah.

“Don’t you argue socialism with me,” she’d said. “This has got nothing to do with you and your ideas. A tradition is a tradition, and I’m not going to be the shame of the whole neighborhood just for Mr. Marx’s sake.”

So week after week Nathan toiled over his Torah portion, without comprehension. To his every question about the text, the sour Rabbi Menken would respond, “Your job is to recite, not interpret.” Filled with a newfound sense of solidarity with his father about rabbis, Nathan had pleaded, “Pop, do I have to become a Bar Mitzvah?”

“It’s important to your mother. So you do it. That’s all,” Pop had answered, cutting short a rebuttal with the flick of his open newspaper.

On the day Nathan was recognized as a man before the whole community, it was Pop’s face he looked for in vain among the congregation as he plodded flawlessly through the Hebrew. But Pop had stayed home in protest, just as he’d promised. “I’m no hypocrite,” he’d said.

Rafael squinted at him. “What do any of us know about what goes on in the privacy of a man’s heart? But one thing I know is your father was a believer. Not because of what he said, but because of what he did.”

“What did he do?” Nathan wanted to know.

“The Jews said that on his last night in Zokof, he scrambled on all fours through this cemetery, in fear for his life. His cries were so terrible they could be heard even by the souls of the dead. Next to the walls that used to surround this cemetery, the souls of suicides and criminals heard him. Itzik’s cries were hard as rock, flint. They lit a holy spark in him.”

“Why did he come here in the first place?” Nathan asked, barely able to contain his shock, to reconcile the boy in the story with the man he’d known all his life, a man who moved with the slowness of pulled dough, a man who avoided the troubles of others if at all possible. This Polish Itzik Leiber and the man he knew as Pop didn’t match.

Rafael held up his hand, signaling that he would not be moved off course. “That holy spark lit Itzik’s way to the grave of a woman named Freidl Alterman, aleha ha sholem—may she rest in peace.” He turned his head and looked off into the cemetery for a moment. “Itzik held on to her gravestone. It was a new one, unsteady in the earth, you understand? And in his terror, it was to God that Itzik the Faithless One turned to plead for mercy.”

Nathan was so overcome with this strange image of Pop that everything slowed. His world became very quiet and heavy. Lifting his hand was an effort; he felt as if he were being carried away, unable to control where the story of his father’s childhood was going, much less what its consequences might mean for him. “Why did he have to plead for mercy?” he asked.

“Because that night he had committed a sin so great he knew he had to repent immediately and with complete sincerity. Without excuse. Without anger at his father or the rabbis.” Rafael brushed some bark from his coat. “The story is told that Itzik the Faithless One prayed so hard for mercy, he pulled Freidl’s stone over. Broke it in two.” Rafael gestured with his hands as if breaking something. “They were after him that night. They chased him all the way here. But she protected him. She scared them away.”

“The menacing old Jewess spirit?”

Rafael nodded. “Freidl. She left her grave for him and became a wandering soul. She knew he needed her, and she, a childless woman, needed him.”

A tractor made its way down the road outside the cemetery.

“But what sin did my father commit?” Nathan asked. He ached with frustration at having to interpret the facts of his father’s life through the superstitious prism of a religious imagination.

He asks what sin his father committed? He knows nothing, the past is blotted out? I flew from tree to tree, upsetting the crows.