24

ELLEN WAVERED BETWEEN CURIOSITY AND ANGER AT HER FATHER for never having mentioned Rafael Bergson. “Tell me about him,” she said.

Her father leaned back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head. “There’s a Yiddish word—beshert. Pop used to use it. Know what it means?”

She was mildly annoyed by the professorial pose. “Not really,” she said.

“It suggests that something is meant to happen. Fate, if you will.” He studied her.

She doubted he believed in fate. She assumed he just had something to tell her that he couldn’t bring himself to say outright—like the time he’d insisted they go ice skating in a snowstorm, to discuss the subject of love, he said, when what he meant was she could not sleep under his roof with the college boyfriend she’d brought home that weekend.

The pause in their conversation threatened to become awkward.

“I was walking around Zokof, without any idea of what I was looking for,” he finally offered. “I had an unpleasant driver, and no one I saw seemed approachable. I told you how they looked at me.”

She nodded, losing a notch of her anger at the thought of him walking around a rural village in his galoshes.

“So I just wandered. I happened to take a certain lane, and there he was.”

Ellen didn’t really think this rose to the level of fate, but she wasn’t going to argue the point, yet. “How did you even know he was Jewish?” she asked.

Her father smiled indulgently. “That would be hard to miss. He wears a yarmulke and the long coat. And a beard, of course. The whole bit.”

She noted his use of the present tense, as if he was preparing her to recognize Rafael Bergson when she met him.

“When I established that he spoke English, I told him Pop was born in Zokof. He insisted I come with him to the cemetery.”

“That’s pretty weird.”

“I thought so too, and I didn’t particularly want to go, but he made it difficult for me to refuse.” He drummed two nervous fingers on his armrest. “I just thought I’d pay my respects and that would be the end of it.”

Ellen leaned forward excitedly. “Wouldn’t people from our family be buried in the Zokof cemetery?”

“That’s really why I agreed to go with him. I thought I’d see some of their gravestones, something connected to Pop.” He shook his head. “But there’s nothing to see. The place doesn’t even look like a cemetery. It’s a forest, with a few overgrown paths running through it. And a lot of crows.”

“Crows?” Ellen repeated, briefly recalling the crow at her window.

“They’re in the treetops. They make quite an unsettling racket.”

“What happened to the gravestones?”

He pursed his lips. “Rafael says the Nazis and the Russians tore out the stones and used them for building projects. Apparently, you can find Jewish gravestones all over Poland—on the undersides of sidewalks, in building foundations, even cut for manhole covers. You can even find a few in the cemeteries. But not in Zokof.”

She recognized the sarcasm. It was just like her grandfather’s.

“Of course, the Nazis and the Russians were only the first to desecrate the graves. After them, came the Poles. Their neighbors’ gravestones.” His fingers stopped drumming, and he looked at her sharply. “You see what I mean about them? Why should you help the Poles look good?”

She considered his question. “Is that why you’ve refused to work on that book with the Polish professor?”

He seemed surprised she knew about this. “Maybe that’s part of it,” he admitted.

“But, Dad, if Rafael Bergson stayed, there must be some decent people around.”

“That’s not why Rafael stayed!”

“Why then?”

Her father rubbed his eyes under his glasses. A couple of kids ran by the house, their shouts a sharp contrast to the silence that had fallen over the study. He picked up the paper clip on his desk and began to work at straightening it.

“Rafael stayed in Zokof because of a woman buried in the cemetery.”

“His wife?”

He shook his head and tilted back the photograph of Isaac on the desk. “No, this woman was already buried when Rafael was a child.”

Ellen smiled. “Like the love story Mary Aiken told us, about the man who lived across the road from a graveyard in the Adirondacks? Remember? He wouldn’t sell the house because the poem on one of the gravestones made him fall in love with the woman buried there.”

He looked at her blankly, even though Mary Aiken was a close friend and Ellen knew he’d been in the room when Mary had told the story. Typical Dad, she thought. He hadn’t listened to a word. The subject was beneath his attention. “What did Mom say when you told her about Rafael?”

“I haven’t told Mom much about Rafael,” he said stiffly. “I think I might have told her I met a man who showed me around Zokof. She’s not particularly interested, and I didn’t want to make a cocktail story of him. We’ve had some correspondence since I got back. He’s an extraordinary intellect.” He hesitated. “Well, it’s been sporadic. It’s hard for him to write letters and get them mailed.”

“I’ll look forward to meeting him then,” she said confidently. “Don’t you think it’s incredible that this opportunity has come up? I mean, what are the odds that I’d be chosen by a Polish dance company director?” She was sure that would get a rise out of him.

Her father picked at his fingernail. “Actually, I haven’t been able to get that very thought out of my mind. Of all the young people this director of yours met—not to belittle your talent, Ellen—but from all those people, he chose you, Isaac Leiber’s granddaughter. It’s like it was, well, beshert.”

“Yeh, right, fate.” She was sure he was kidding.

“It’s even stranger than that,” he said, glancing up at his shelves. “Last month, a book about Jewish cemeteries in Poland fell out of a remainder bin onto my foot at some bookstore on the square. I’ll show it to you later. I meet people who tell me, unasked, they’re from that part of Poland. They name towns I passed through in the car. Your mother and I went to a concert a few weeks ago and I heard music...I can’t describe it, but it’s from there.”

For a moment, Ellen felt the way children do when they see their parents drunk for the first time, acting out of character, out of control, and it scared her.

He stood up suddenly, walked over to his wooden cabinet, and slowly opened it. He lifted out a big lumpy object covered with cloth and cradled it in his arms. “It all comes back to this,” he said, carefully laying the lump on his desk. He began to unwrap it.

“What is that?”

“This is the top of the only surviving gravestone from the Zokof cemetery. It belongs to the woman for whom Rafael stayed in Zokof. Her name is Freidl.”

She jumped off the couch. “How did you get that?”

“Rafael Bergson gave it to me.”

“Why?”

“Because, he told me, after the peasant was killed, Pop ran into the cemetery and hid behind this stone. Rafael said it’s broken because Pop pulled it over.”

“This is the stone Grandpa broke?” She was stunned.

Her father nodded.

She looked from the bundle to the photograph of her grandfather, trying to figure out where to start unraveling this story. “Why didn’t Rafael put the stone back on her grave?”

“I don’t know exactly. Probably, he was afraid of vandals. But when I went to his house, Rafael gave this part of the stone to me, in trust, to do something appropriate with it.”

“Why you?”

“He says the stone belongs with us. Because of Pop.”

“Well, do you really think it’s appropriate to keep it in a cabinet?”

He looked embarrassed. “I don’t know what to do with it. I even tried reading from the bible, Tanakh, it’s called. I thought maybe I’d find a clue there because he and Freidl are religious.” In his agitation, he stopped in midsentence, and only then did he seem to realize his daughter was looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

“Are religious?” Ellen said. “You said she’s dead.” He seemed so lost, so distraught about the stone and what he was supposed to do with it. She squeezed his arm gently and asked, “Didn’t he tell you what he wants you to do? Why didn’t you show it to me?”

He pushed his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. “I wasn’t ready to show this to you. And your mother wanted to make it an art piece.” He looked at the stone. “It’s not art. I won’t hang it on a wall.” There was a certain defiance in his voice.

Curious, she asked, “What weren’t you ready for?”

Ellen watched her father as he continued to unwrap the stone. From the sure way his hands moved, she knew he’d wrapped and unwrapped it many times before. At last, he removed a black and white striped piece of fringed cloth and revealed a gray stone tablet, rounded at the top, broken off at the bottom. He gazed at the stone. “Come, take a closer look at this,” he said.

She approached the tablet and instinctively ran her hand over its face and sides. It was about two inches thick. She dipped her fingertips into the rough hollows of the Hebrew letters and wondered what they said. Her only contact with the Hebrew alphabet had been playing the Hanukah dreydl game in elementary school during the holiday season. Every year, one of the other Jewish parents would come to class and explain the meaning of the letters on each side of the dreydl. She didn’t remember the letters’ names. Her parents didn’t play the game. They had a Christmas tree.

“What does the stone say?” she asked.

“I can’t remember how to read Hebrew. And I wouldn’t understand it even if I could,” her father said. “But Rafael told me it says she was the daughter of a famous Talmudic scholar from Lublin.”

Ellen found it somehow offensive that the woman had been defined in death by her relation to someone else. “What else?”

“She married a man from Zokof and died there in 1905, at the age of eighty three.”

“No, I mean who was she?”

He seemed pleased, relieved actually, at her interest. “She was a scholar; she read Hebrew. That was unusual for a woman in those days. But since she was childless, apparently they didn’t mind what she did with her time.”

“Did Grandpa know her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you seem to know a lot about her.”

He shrugged. “Everything I know, Rafael told me. Grandpa never said a word about her. I don’t know what he knew.”

She looked at the photograph. Her father rested his hand on the stone and looked down at it again. “There’s only one memorial in the Zokof cemetery. It’s the pile of remembrance stones Rafael made for her.”

“Where’s the rest of the stone, the bottom?”

Her father sighed. “He said that after the war, it was laid, facedown, as pavement in the town. Then a farmer stole it. It’s still there, at his farm.” He looked away. “It’s terrible,” he said. “I still don’t like the idea of your going there.”

“Well, I’m going.”

Their eyes met again.

“I just don’t think it’s appropriate,” he said.

Ellen could no longer conceal her anger at him. “I don’t think you’re in a position anymore to tell me what’s appropriate. You’ve been back from Poland all this time, and you never thought it might be appropriate for me to hear about this? You didn’t think I might like to know what happened to my grandfather?”

“I didn’t think you’d be interested,” he said weakly.

“Oh, come on, Dad. I’ve asked you many times about Poland. You just blew me off! You pretended it wasn’t even worth describing. Now you tell me you went to Grandpa’s hometown and met someone who lived there when Grandpa did. You’ve been to the cemetery where people in our family are buried. And this Freidl thing. How can you call that nothing? If Pronaszko hadn’t invited me to Poland, I would never have known about any of this. You wouldn’t have told me. I can’t believe you!”

His face was rigid. He studied his fingers. “I didn’t know you’d feel this way about it,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d care. You wanted me to bring his handkerchief back there. I thought that was enough for you.”

“That’s because I didn’t know there was anything more!”

“There was nothing more I could have told you then. I didn’t understand it myself. I still don’t. You know I don’t identify with all those religious rituals. He wanted me to pray in the cemetery. Can you believe it?” He looked off again. “Why should you have to be burdened with such things?”

“What prayer?” she asked, uncomfortably aware she wouldn’t know one from another.

“El Molei Rachamim, it’s called. Pop would’ve died all over again if he’d seen me.”

“You mean, you actually did it?”

He nodded.

She couldn’t imagine how anyone could talk her father into praying. He who affected a look as if he’d been sprayed with a bad odor whenever the subject of God came up. “I’ve got to meet this guy Rafael,” she said.

He rubbed his eyes under his glasses again and turned wearily to the stone, as if for a sign of approval. “I suppose you do. He was one of the children the peasant was beating that night. He feels responsible for what happened to Pop because he called out his name. That’s how the Poles knew it was Pop.”

Ellen was having trouble processing this information.

“I want you to promise me something,” her father said.

“Sure,” she said weakly.

“Promise you’ll call me before you go to Zokof. And I don’t want you there at night. It’s not a place you can wander around after dark. The men drink, and they’re not used to foreign women, especially women traveling alone,” he said, not returning her shocked stare. “Poland’s not that big. Actually, it’s about the size of New Mexico. Zokof is in the eastern part of the country, and you’ll be in the south. I suppose you could take a day trip there.” He said this quickly, as if by doing so she might not notice that he had capitulated.

“Pronaszko won’t need me every day. I’ll have time,” she said cautiously, not understanding his change of heart but not wanting to argue.

He patted the back of his head awkwardly. “I’ll handle getting you a driver. I’ve made a few calls, as a precaution, in case you insisted on going.” He looked a bit sheepish. “In Warsaw, they have something called the Lauder Foundation, to help Polish Jews. It’s funded in the States, by the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. I was told they’d know someone reliable. But I want you to promise me you’ll stay close to him.”

“I’ll stay close.” Ellen smiled, delighted she’d be going to Poland with his blessing after all.

Three weeks later, he was dead.

On December 21, more than three hundred people attended the service for her father at Harvard’s Memorial Church, many of them arriving in Cambridge from all over the United States and abroad. In the entryway, they filed past the enlarged photographs of Nathan, including the one where he posed, in his ascot and trench coat, with President Carter, and one of him reading in the hammock at the Adirondacks house.

In lieu of a rabbi, Ellen and her mother had asked several friends, colleagues, and former students to speak at the gathering. Each recalled a slightly different aspect of the man. Nathan the champion of law as social policy; Nathan the friend of foreign students; Nathan the no-sense-of-direction tour guide in Cappadocia, Turkey. From Ellen, they heard about Nathan the father, who taught himself to ice skate—badly—so that she, an only child, would always have a partner.

Afterward, the family took the urn with his ashes to Mount Auburn Cemetery and buried it in a shallow hole below a modern abstract sculpture. Her mother politely refused her father’s old friend Mort Grinberg’s offer to recite Kaddish. “Nathan wasn’t a believer. Why be hypocritical?” she said.

Ellen hadn’t disagreed. But she felt the absence of ritual at the burial site, as if they had not done right by him somehow, that the job of laying him to rest was unfinished.

Later, when they all returned home, she excused herself and went upstairs to her father’s study. She opened the cabinet with the gravestone. Wedged next to it, she found a round Plexiglas canister on which a meadow scene had been painted. Inside was a tightly sealed bag and a note addressed to Rafael. Seeing her father’s almost impenetrably tight script again brought tears to her eyes. It read, “I am sure you will find my daughter Ellen a more winning student than I of your impressive body of knowledge. Here at home, I am finding the meadow and planting a seed. In the meantime, I hope you both enjoy this sugar for your tea.”

She took the canister and note from the cabinet, realizing he had intended her to take it to Poland. Underneath it, she found a manila envelope containing several documents. They appeared to be some kind of trust account, with Rafael Bergson as the beneficiary of a monthly stipend for the remainder of his life. She also found a paper, signed by her father, that seemed to indicate that although he was the sole source of these funds, the beneficiary had been given to understand that they had been collected from “elderly Bundists in America.” Her father, it said, preferred that this understanding not be corrected in the event of his incapacity or death.

Although Ellen had no idea what Bundists were, she began to weep. “Oh, Dad,” she said, muffling her cry with her hand. She scanned the shelves for the two books she had come to his study to retrieve.

“I want you to take a look at this book,” her father had said at the end of their last session. “It’s called the Tanakh, the Jewish bible.”

She had taken the book from him hesitantly. “Why do you want to give this to me?” she had asked, believing a history of Poland might have been more useful.

“Read it. You’ll recognize a lot of the stories. I think you’ll find it useful when you meet Rafael. Read the section called Lamentations. You’ll be amazed. It’s pure poetry. Actually, I’ve been surprised at how much our orientation to the world is based on this one book.” He had reached into the top drawer of his desk and taken out a blue booklet.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a prayer book. I picked it up at Sol Litvak’s funeral a few months ago. El Molei Rachamim is in here, the prayer for the dead. You might want to recite it in the cemetery.”

She had opened the booklet. Next to the transliterations, it was filled with indecipherable Hebrew letters, punctuated by dots and dashes. Her grandpa Isaac was the only one in the family who could read this stuff, she thought, and he had called it crap—the Opiate of the People. She could still hear him saying it.

“Wouldn’t Grandpa go nuts if he knew we were reading this?”

“I’m not so sure,” her father said.

She had managed to forget to take either of the books home with her that day. Maybe, if she had to be perfectly honest, she had done it on purpose. The idea of her father giving her religious books gave her the creeps. Now, with a terrible sense of guilt, she gathered them both in her arms to take with her to Poland.

On the train ride back to New York, she wrote Rafael a letter informing him of her father’s death, and asking him if he would meet with her when she arrived in Poland that summer.