23

A COLD WIND FLICKED AT ELLEN’S LONG CURLS AS SHE CLIMBED the Harvard Square subway station stairs that Friday afternoon. In front of the Coop, a draft lifted the silk scarf from around her shoulders and tossed it skyward. She plucked it from the air and hurried down Massachusetts Avenue to her parents’ house on Lancaster Street, followed all the way by swirling gusts and sunlight illuminating the copper cast of her hair.

She liked to kid her father that the house on Lancaster Street was his other child. That year, he’d fussed over the choice of colors for the outside—the right shade of wine for the windows and the cream trim against the chocolate siding. He’d spent months poring over paint samples, while the shrubs and flowers her mother planted spilled and sprouted in the front yard and along the brick walk as if driven by some internal force to do their best at enhancing her father’s pride and joy.

He came to the glass storm door, looking pleased to see her, in his usual restrained way. He kissed her cheek and shook his head doubtfully at the row of tiny beaded hoops ringing her left ear.

“Like them? I added a few new ones.” She laughed and hugged him hard. “Where’s Mom?”

He gave her his playful, mischievous look, the one from the corners of his eyes. “She went to Fresh Pond. Something special for dinner, I think. Come on in.”

Ellen laid her embossed leather backpack on the foyer table and unbuttoned her coat. Her father lifted it from her shoulders, as he always did.

“Your mother had a coat that flared from the waist like that, a calf-length aubergine wool,” he said. “Forty years ago.”

She smiled at his enjoyment of what he called her “opera getups.” He said that even in her lace trimmed jeans, she looked dressed for the Met.

The sun poured through the oversized living room windows onto the little bronze Indian god Shiva—the Lord of Dance, her father liked to remind her—who balanced, one legged and many armed, on the coffee table. She went in and sat in the Eames chair, loving the thrill she still got from seeing his treasures—the giant turtle shell that leaned against the fireplace, the African thumb pianos, the masks, the ancient ceramic pots, the rugs. Her father had brought each of them home with an elaborate acquisition story. “Ellen’s legacy,” he called the collection.

She unlaced her high heeled boots and curled her feet under her, wondering what promise he was planning to extract from her with this dutiful visit.

From the arched doorway, her father cleared his throat. “When you’re ready,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you upstairs in my study.”

She did not protest that they hadn’t yet had lunch. A meal with him would be a lot more pleasant after they’d finished this business about Poland.

The old wood creaked as they climbed the stairs. She brushed her hand over the Moroccan camel bag on the stair wall to release the hint of its animal smell, then followed her father down the narrow hallway to the back of the house. Her heart beat with anticipation and a slight sense of dread at having to take him on. Growing up in this house, there were times Ellen had so wearied of her father’s insistence on discussion and analysis, she’d almost envied Tommy Brant down the street, whose father resolved family conflicts simply, with a strap.

Her father opened the door to his study. “Have a seat,” he said, indicating the couch.

She didn’t like his sudden formal tone, as if he were speaking to a student. But her displeasure was short-lived. On her father’s desk, framed and prominently displayed, was the sepia tone photograph of her grandpa Isaac as a teenager. This was surprising, as he’d never before shown much interest in the photograph. It was Ellen who had ritualistically unearthed it from the family album, always fascinated that this skinny, tightly dressed European boy had become her round old grandpa Isaac, a man who wore undershirts tucked into baggy trousers and black leather slippers with socks—an unkempt, working-class look that always seemed to embarrass her dad.

“Why did you frame Grandpa’s picture?” she asked, settling herself slowly onto the hard Danish sofa. She hadn’t remembered just how sad the boy’s distinctive large eyes were. By the time he’d become her grandpa, his eyes had acquired the droopy sweetness of a hound dog.

Her father regarded the photograph with a tight expression. “We’ll discuss that presently,” he said. He seated himself in his brown leather desk chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together. It reminded Ellen of how Grandpa Isaac used to say, “A man who holds his cards too close to his chest is hiding a bad hand.”

“Ellen,” her father said, turning to her, “I’m really very glad you came.” He reached for a paper clip on his desk and slowly bent its tongue back and forth. “It’s important we have this discussion face to face.” He set the paper clip down meaningfully, then pressed his fingers together again, as if considering the course of his lecture.

Ellen recognized these gestures as his way of asserting control over the conversation, and her usual response would have been to rile him until he loosened up. But something, perhaps a sense that he was upset, made her hold her tongue.

“You may know,” he said, “or maybe you guessed, perhaps Mother mentioned it, my trip to Poland was...well, it was problematic.” He sniffed, as if trying to lend authority to his scattershot phrasing. “I haven’t felt the need to burden you with the details. There wasn’t anything I needed to...you see, there wasn’t a point. But since you’ve come up with this idea of going to Poland...” He paused, as if disturbed anew by the thought. “I feel it’s only right, as your father, to give you some facts to consider.”

She leaned on the arm of the couch, unused to his being so nervous and unsure with her.

He cleared his throat. “The main thing is, I visited Pop’s town, Zokof, when I was there.”

She glanced at the photograph again. “You never told me that,” she said uneasily.

Awkwardly, he put his hand to the back of his head.

She knew the more tense he was, the more stilted his movements became.

“It was an awful place. People looked at me as if I was some kind of a suspicious character.” He raised his brows skeptically. “Can you imagine?”

For all her discomfort at her father’s secrecy, Ellen had to smile. It was no surprise to her that, outside Cambridge, people might find him odd. He belonged to that set of academicians who wore ascots and Russian fur hats, who paired rubber soled shoes with dress slacks, blithely unaware of the violence they did to normal ideas of fashion. They were dear men, darling to her, actually. But to the outside world, they did look strange, maybe even suspicious.

He pressed his fingers together again and assumed a serious expression. “Do you remember when I went to southern China in 1982?”

She nodded, wondering what one thing had to do with the other.

“Everywhere I went, people surrounded me and stared. Hundreds of people.” He spread his arms wide to demonstrate. “But at no time did I ever have a moment’s fear for my safety. They were just curious. They’d never seen an Occidental before. But in Zokof...” He glanced at the photograph of his father and shook his head. “To this day, I don’t know what to make of those people’s faces. They had no curiosity.” There was an awkward silence. He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Horrible,” he said.

Ellen could feel his tension ratcheting again.

“If your grandfather was here, he’d tell you about those people.”

“Those people? Since when do you talk like that?”

He shot her an angry look.

“I bet Grandpa would be thrilled if I went to his town. He’d have loved for me to see where he came from.”

Her father tapped a nervous finger on the desk. “Your grandfather wouldn’t have wanted you anywhere near that cauldron.”

She wrapped one of her longer curls around her finger and studied his agitation. Her father looked ready to explode, yet the ominous conversation seemed to be lurching around without a focus. “I think maybe you’re being a little paranoid.”

“No, I’m not,” he said angrily. “People will look at you, and they won’t be kind. This isn’t just any foreign country!”

“What are you talking about, Dad? I’m a dance choreographer. What are they going to look at?”

A look of panic suddenly crossed his face. “Did you tell Pronaszko anything about Pop?”

“I said my grandfather was Polish,” she said, unused to such an open display of panic from him.

He considered her answer, as if assessing the information’s potential for harm. “Well, don’t tell him anything more than that. He doesn’t have to know.”

“Know what?”

“To them, you’ll be a Jew!”

Ellen paled. He’d never talked to her like this, and he looked scared.

“Dad,” she said gently, “what is this—saying I’m Jewish as if there’s something wrong, and those people, and calling a town a cauldron? All my life you’ve taught me not to judge people like that.” Her voice wavered.

Her father worked the muscles on the sides of his face like a man readying himself for a dangerous leap. He reached for the blue Venetian paperweight on his desk and rolled it in his palm. “You don’t have any experience with this,” he said finally.

“With what?”

“Anti Semitism.” He looked directly at her. “What are you going to do when they start in?”

This seemed to her less a question than an expression of his anxiety. “Come on,” she said, trying to soothe him, “do you think it comes as some big surprise to me that there are people who don’t like Jews? Should we all convert, to make morons happy? And what, exactly, would we Lindens convert to, Dad, since we’re not much of anything in the religious department?” She thought this would make him smile, but it didn’t. His jaw just clamped tighter.

He sniffed. “It wouldn’t help.”

She tried again. “Look, you worried when I went to Indonesia. Remember? You worried when I went to Peru. You’ve always said the world isn’t a safe place, especially for women. I know that. Dad, I’m very careful. Trust me, I wouldn’t walk around Zokof or Kraków with a Star of David around my neck, though, come on, I wouldn’t wear one anywhere. How tacky is that?” She smiled at him hopefully.

“It wouldn’t matter,” he said tensely. “They’ll know you’re Jewish. They just do.”

She was utterly exasperated with him. “So what?”

“So, you can simply not put yourself in that situation. Pronaszko can find someone else, and you can do better.”

She tried to control her anger. “No, I meant so what if they know I’m Jewish? I want this job, Dad. I’m going to take it. It’s in Kraków, not Zokof, if that’s what you’re worried about. And if anyone in the company asks, I have no problem telling them I’m Jewish because, here’s the thing, they’re not going to care. No way are Polish dancers going to be different from American dancers. They’re going to be obsessed with their love lives and their bodies. They’re going to be worrying about getting work and how they’re going to pay the rent.” She waited a beat, for emphasis. “Believe me, my being Jewish is not going to make a blip on their radar.”

He was looking out the window as if he wasn’t listening to her at all. A clod of icy snow, a remnant from the last storm, fell from the fir tree outside his window and startled them both.

“Do you know why your grandfather came to America?”

She was surprised by this change in the conversation’s direction. “He told me it was because they were so poor in Poland.”

“Well, that’s not why. Your grandfather came here because he had to, because one night in 1906, he saved three Jewish children from being whipped by a Polish peasant.” He turned to her with challenging, narrowed eyes. “Can you even imagine such a thing? A grown man in a wagon beating five year olds? That’s your grandfather’s Poland. You think he’d want you to see that? I say he wouldn’t. And neither do I, because it hasn’t changed. Nothing’s changed.”

Ellen felt paralyzed. Her father’s voice, raised and angry, was as terrifying as the crazy story he was telling. She wanted to jump in the car and drive to Fresh Pond to look for her mother. Her mother would calm things down, lend some perspective.

Her father disregarded her unease, if he’d noticed it at all. “Pop grabbed the peasant’s whip,” he said as if he’d witnessed the act himself. “The man fell under his wagon, and the wheel ran over his head. Killed him! Your grandfather had to run away from Zokof. All he took were some things his mother packed for him and a hair ribbon his sister Hindeleh gave him.” With an unsteady hand, he picked up the framed photograph and waved it at Ellen. “This was taken just a few days later, in Warsaw. The clothes aren’t even his!”

“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this? I didn’t even know Grandpa had a sister!” Ellen said, deeply wounded and shocked. It wasn’t as if her grandfather hadn’t told her anything about his childhood. He’d slept on top of the oven when he was little, he’d said. It was the warmest place in the house. “And you didn’t get burned?” she’d asked him repeatedly. He’d just smiled at her indulgently, leaving it to others to explain that his oven wasn’t like the one in the Lindens’ kitchen.

Nathan regarded his daughter carefully. “I didn’t tell you about Hindeleh because I didn’t know about her either. He never told us a lot of things. It seems his mother and her four other children left Zokof because of what happened that night. Only his brother Gershom made it back.” He tapped his desk, musing. “Strange,” he said, “Gershom became a baker, like Pop.”

“What’s strange,” Ellen said tersely, “is that in a year and a half you haven’t bothered to tell me any of this.”

Now Nathan looked wounded. “I wasn’t sure if it was true. I’m still not. I’m not!” he insisted as if he didn’t think she would believe him.

Their eyes met.

“But you’re right,” he conceded. “It’s time I tell you about it. God knows, time hasn’t made anything clearer to me. I can’t understand how he went through his whole life without telling anyone about his mother or this little Hindeleh, or the rest of his family. How?” Her father looked desperate.

“Dad...” Even in her anger, it scared Ellen to see him so distressed. “Are you okay? Maybe we should take a break.”

“No. I just can’t stand the thought of your going there.”

“How do you know his sister gave him a hair ribbon?”

“He told me,” her father said softly.

“I thought you said Grandpa didn’t tell you about her.”

“He didn’t.”

“Then who?”

Her father grimaced. “The last Jew in Zokof.”

The phrase was powerfully evocative to Ellen. She recalled a black-and-white Roman Vishniac photograph of a peddler in the snow, half his face in shadow.

“That’s right, he’s the only one left,” her father said sharply. “His name is Rafael Bergson. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what they did to all the other Jews of Zokof. The ones Nazis didn’t kill or chase out during the war, the Poles finished off after.”

He was wound up so tightly she didn’t dare interrupt. Almost reluctantly she asked, “How did you find this man?”

Her father’s face softened, and with a sad, secretive smile, he said, “Call it a coincidence.”