26

UPON RETURNING TO HER ROOM, ELLEN CALLED HER MOTHER. If her father had been alive she would have admitted that her first day with the company had been difficult and that she was pretty depressed. But she had learned that the death of a parent creates an imbalance that is less forgiving of normal family complaints.

“Today was fine. Really fine. It was a good class, just a little weird in Polish. I couldn’t talk much to anyone,” she said in her bright upper register. She described the cobbled streets, the courtyards, the hejnalج the amber earrings she’d just bought at the Cloth Hall. Taking a small risk, she said she wished Dad could have seen all this too. The silence that followed this remark made her add, “This afternoon I’m going to visit the castle in the middle of the city. It’s on the top of a fortified hill.”

“By yourself?” Her mother sounded alarmed.

“Yes, by myself. It’s totally safe.” What Ellen wasn’t going to admit was that she felt unmoored, that she’d have preferred to work, to connect, not to loll hours away on tourist attractions. “You know how I am when I travel. I like to scope out a city alone. Anyway, this place is called Wawel.” She cleared her throat and affected a deep tourist guide’s voice. “This was the seat of Polish kings for five hundred years.”

“I see,” her mother said.

“No, really, there’s a whole museum complex up there, and a cathedral.” She was aware of working too hard for her mother’s approval.

“Don’t you have work to do with the company?”

From the careful tone her mother used, Ellen knew she had detected something was wrong. “Today is sort of an off day. There’s nothing scheduled until tomorrow.” She hoped her mother wouldn’t ask why because she had no answer, which, in itself, was worrisome.

“I thought there’d be some sort of reception for you tonight,” her mother suggested.

Ellen crumpled into a ball on the lumpy bed and tried to keep her voice even. This was something her father would have said. Receptions for visitors were the specialty of academicians. They were something her mother, who’d traveled often with him, had grown to expect. Meanwhile, she hadn’t even thought about how she was going to get through the evening. “They don’t do that kind of thing,” she told her mother, in what she hoped was a casual voice.

“But some kind of welcome would seem appropriate,” her mother insisted.

Tears popped over Ellen’s lower lids as if they’d been waiting in the wings for their cue. They dripped sloppily off her nose and onto her pillow. She wiped her eyes. “Pronaszko said he wanted to take me out to lunch but he had some kind of fund-raising meeting. We’re going to do dinner another day.” But even this now seemed tenuous to her.

“I see,” her mother said, in a way that sounded doubtful and judgmental of Pronaszko. For that, Ellen loved her fiercely. She gripped the phone hand piece, straining to be closer to home. Finally, she realized she had to let go. “Mom, this is costing a fortune. I’ll call you tomorrow night, okay?”

“So everything’s fine?”

“Everything’s fine.”

They said good bye.

She threw on a pair of jeans and the comforting blue cowboy boots. On her way out the door, she grabbed some scarves and her short mustard silk jacket from the armoire.

By the time she’d reached the impressive sight of Wawel Hill, some fifteen minutes’ walk from her hotel, she felt much better, even though it looked like rain. The wind had picked up. She began the climb up the narrow stone ramp that led to the complex of buildings on top. To her left, dark redbrick fortifications supported the hill. On her right, a steep, lush embankment plunged to the street. About halfway up, under a tree, a costumed Polish folk group was playing for a scattering of German tourists. She stopped to listen. Raindrops began pattering onto the leaves of the tree, but she stayed where she was.

The music reminded her of her mother, who’d brought home ethnic recordings ever since Ellen could remember—obscure Russian balladeers, Nana Mouskouri, Odetta, and Miriam Makeba. She’d spent much of her childhood dancing to foreign tunes, wrapped in scarves and loopy ensembles, banging a tambourine while her mother stomped along behind her, clapping and encouraging her to dance and dance and dance.

Ellen slipped some zlotys into the musicians’ basket and continued up the steep incline. The city’s street sounds receded. The spire of Wawel Cathedral rose directly above her. At the top of the hill, she joined the small groups of visitors passing through the castle gate, heading left the short distance to the entrance of the great cathedral.

Inside, the smell of burning wax from hundreds of flickering votive candles permeated the gigantic vaulted space. Her boots echoed on the stone floor. She walked slowly down a side aisle, rolling her heels to muffle their sound in the hushed atmosphere.

The ornate chapels, many of them closed off with grilles, looked to her like miniature stage sets. She peered into one and saw a painting of Saint Sebastian. As a child, she’d pulled her mother from room to room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, looking for all the paintings she could find of the saint. Her mother had thought her ghoulish for counting the number of arrows stuck in him at every painting—under the armpit, in the thigh, through the ribs. She’d had no idea who he was. Years later, finding him again in the galleries of European museums, she’d realized it hadn’t been fascination with his torture that had drawn her to Saint Sebastian. It was his peculiar nakedness, so unnecessary for a man being executed by arrow. The unspoken secret in all these portraits, it had seemed to her, was how many painters had used him, of all the saints, as a model for the suggestiveness of a beautiful young man, tied helplessly to a tree. But now, as she stood looking at the painting in the Wawel chapel, she sensed from the dense Polish iconography that some other allusion to the saint was being made, that a conversation among Poles, something about martyrdom, was under way in that space. Intrigued, she moved down the nave toward the central altar, instinctively running her hands along the cold stone smoothness of the royal carved sarcophagi as she went.

She noticed a middle aged couple seated in a pew. Their faces, lit in profile by the votive lights, flickered in and out of shadow like a Rembrandt painting. Ellen sank onto a bench and scanned the twenty or thirty faithful bowed in prayer throughout the cathedral. Stout, ruddy peasants and urban sophisticates alike, on their knees. What did these people think about in that pose? she wondered. Were they forming words of atonement or reciting wish lists to God?

This need to pray had baffled her since she was eight years old, the night her parents went out for the evening and Grandpa Isaac had told her the rocket story. She remembered how he had shuffled into her room and stood at the foot of her bed, not knowing where to put himself in the glow of her nightlight.

“Your grandmother sent me up to tell you a story. I don’t know from stories,” he’d said.

Maybe he’d thought she’d let him go, send him back downstairs with a good excuse. Instead, feeling very grown up, she’d patted the coverlet and said, “Sit on my bed, Grandpa. You can read me a story. Dad’s been reading me Hans Brinker.”

“Oy, Gottenu,” he’d said, which meant no. She didn’t yet realize that Grandpa Isaac could barely read in English. He’d rolled his big dark eyes upward and sat down. Ellen had always loved her grandfather’s eyes. She used to think he stored wisdom in the great domes of his lids. “What kind of story you want to hear?”

She chose carefully. “Tell me about heaven,” she’d said. In the Linden family, this was the equivalent of asking about sex. Her parents wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever she asked, all they wanted to know was who put the idea in her head. Once, she told them her friend Mary Sorentino had said God lived in heaven behind pearly gates. They were speechless. “We, we don’t believe in that,” her mom had finally stammered.

“What do we believe?” Ellen had asked.

“In nature,” her dad had said.

“You don’t have to believe in nature,” Ellen had argued. “Nature is all around us. You can touch it. What if God made nature?”

“There is no such thing as God,” her father had said.

She knew she’d hit the outer wall of what could be discussed. And that night with Grandpa, she knew she was taking a chance asking him about heaven too. The thing she didn’t understand was why they got so upset with her for asking.

“Oy, Gottenu,” Grandpa had said again.

Then they were both quiet. She had stared at his bald head. Its shape reminded her of an egg.

He’d cleared his throat. “The only story about heaven is there is no story.”

“How come?”

“Because if they shot a rocket up in the sky that could go forever, it would never reach anything.”

“You mean no gates? No walls? Nothing? Just more space?”

“Yeh.”

His certainty had amazed her.

“That’s scientific,” he’d continued. “Heaven is for the stupidstitious.”

“Stupidstitious!” She had laughed, edging her way into his orbit.

Grandpa Isaac had laughed too, which was rare. She’d wrapped her arms around him, basking in his precious warmth until, without warning, he’d stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and startled her by walking out of the room without delivering his usual clumsy kiss good night. She didn’t try to call him back. Even at that age, she knew her grandfather’s power to dispense love was limited.

Ellen never asked Grandpa Isaac to tell her another story, and he never did. But ever after, she could not believe in God. That would be “stupidstitious.”

Years later, in high school and in college, she would lie awake, working out arguments for believing in a Supreme Being. But even when she’d decided it was as plausible for there to be a Supreme Planner behind the Big Bang as for matter and energy to create the universe on their own, she’d found herself returning to the image of Grandpa’s rocket, hurtling through an infinite universe without a God or heaven capable of blocking its way. A cold, lonely feeling would come over her, as if she’d been left alone in the dark.

By the time Ellen descended Wawel Hill, the rain had stopped. She ordered a coffee at a small café at the base, unable to face the long evening alone in her room. Families and couples went by. No one spoke to her, or even met her eyes. They were all engaged in the earnest business of living daily life. Only she had to pretend a purpose in being in Kraków. She felt anxious again, and horribly lonely.

The July air was warm, and a feathery light brushed the city. She wandered south along the riverbank, intending to make a slow, wide circle back to the hotel.

On a whim, she turned inland and noticed immediately that the neighborhood, identified as Kazimierz on her map, had changed. The architecture seemed duller, in a late-nineteenth-century way. Many windows were shattered or missing panes. Her pulse quickened with excitement at being off the beaten path.

At a nearly deserted marketplace a few blocks east, several old women in nylon kneesocks and cotton skirts stood under canopies gathering single eggs, small bottles of milk, apples, and garden greens from makeshift tables. They didn’t try to sell Ellen anything. She passed through, feeling invisible.

She walked beneath a stone archway and eventually came to a shadowy street called Józefa, no wider than a compact car. For some reason, the name caught her eye. Probably because, unlike most Polish names, it was so easy to pronounce. As she ventured down it, the bustle of human activity disappeared so quickly, she wondered if she’d entered an area closed for renovation.

There was almost no one around. The carved double doors lining the street were falling off their hinges, their stately wooden crests almost worn away. She noticed long, deep gouges on the right sides of doorposts and wondered what this meant. Window glass was broken or missing, the empty spaces crudely covered with nailed plywood. Whole sections of stone facade were exposed, revealing dark, rough wounds in the buildings.

A thin middle-aged man, his jacket and trousers frayed and out of shape, swept dirt from a cobbled corner lot pockmarked with sand pits. Wordlessly, a stout woman with a thick cotton scarf around her head bent over a dustpan, brushing in refuse. The smells of desolate, musty alleyways wafted into the shadows of the street, gathering pungency with the dust. Ellen’s cowboy boots echoed on the narrow sidewalk. This silence, in the middle of a city, unnerved her.

The street ended at a large, rectangular plaza, with cars parked in the center. It was marked “Szeroka.” She noticed a little grassy island on the north end, circumscribed by a black wrought-iron fence and heavy chains, and was attracted to this welcome break from the stone cityscape. A large, irregular stone, embedded with a plaque, jutted from the earth, breaking the symmetry of the fence.

Ellen was surprised to see a Star of David at the left corner of the plaque. Three paragraphs followed, each in a different language. The first paragraph looked like Polish. The third was Hebrew. The middle one, in English, read: “Place of meditation upon the martyrdom of sixty-five thousand Polish citizens of Jewish nationality from Kraków and its environs killed by the Nazis during World War II.”

Realizing that she had apparently stumbled into an old Jewish neighborhood, Ellen pivoted a half circle and stared down the length of the empty square. The buildings, uneven in size and material, must have looked the same when the Nazis were there, only perhaps less dilapidated. The sky reflected in every window, like a series of framed photographs. She was shaken by the thought that fifty years ago, on an evening perhaps just like this one, they might have reflected the sky like this, camouflaging the last Jews hiding inside.

She knew it was crazy for her to become overwrought about Kraków’s Jews, to be carried away imagining the presence of dead souls. But the little plaque, understated and seemingly forgotten, had touched her like a human hand. She felt off kilter and disturbed, vaguely aware that her identification with the Jews might just be a way of creating a surer sense of herself than what Pronaszko had given her that morning.

On her right, she noticed a white stucco building with Hebrew letters engraved in a half circle over the arched stone doorway. She wondered if this might be a synagogue, although she couldn’t see inside because the arch was blocked by black iron doors. Just then, one of the doors opened from inside, and an old man in a cap, his distended belly filling a ragged pea green sweater, came out. He quickly shut the door behind him, as if protecting the place from intruding eyes.

Ellen now felt foolish. What did she have in common with a man like that, a man who lived as a Jew? Her Jewishness was an absence, not a presence, a hollow corner of her being with no more to fill it than Grandma Sadie’s chicken soup and the songs of Fiddler on the Roof. She had no idea what it meant beyond that. Except for friends’ Bar Mitzvahs, she’d never even been to a synagogue service.

All her life, when asked about her heritage, Ellen had always said “American,” even when she knew she was being asked if she was Jewish. She didn’t see the point of labeling herself something that didn’t interest her. Dance and art were all the religion she’d ever felt she’d needed.

A sweet-scented breeze blew in her face, carrying the sound of live music to her. Drawn by the beauty of the melody, she followed it toward the southern end of the square, where a massive, fortresslike building sprawled behind a great expanse of paved stone.

At first, Ellen thought the music came from this building. But the breeze directed her toward the adjacent side of the square. There, above a newly renovated whitewashed building with flower boxes in the windows, hung an interesting calligraphied sign that read ariel. Below this, restauracja café. She debated whether to go inside for dinner or whether to take the tram back to the hotel before dark.

The slow, rhythmic tune appealed to her. It was familiar somehow, lulling, comforting, and warm. Suddenly, she realized this was the tune her grandpa Isaac used to hum when he played the card game pisha paysha with her. Of course, his version of the tune sounded more like a march, and he wasn’t much good at staying on key, but she recognized it just the same. “What’s the name of that song?” she’d once asked him. He’d laughed, in his heh, heh way, and said, “That is the ‘Foygl Tune,’” as if this was some kind of joke. Ellen hadn’t minded. She’d thought he’d called it the “For-a-GirlTune,” and remembered it fondly, believing he had made it up for her. Only, years later, when she’d asked him to hum it for her again, he’d looked at her blankly when she’d called it the “For-a-GirlTune.”

“The ‘Foygl Tune,’” he’d said, when he finally understood her. “A foygl, that’s a bird,” he’d said, as if anyone should know this. She had been so disappointed that she’d misunderstood him all those years that she hadn’t even asked him why it was called the “Bird Tune.”

Just as she reached the arched threshold, the music stopped inside the café. She went in, unsure what she was pursuing but knowing she could no more walk away now than if her grandpa Isaac himself were there.

A young woman in conservative blouse and skirt asked her if she’d like to sit in the front or in the back room.

“Who was playing that music?” Ellen asked.

The hostess smiled shyly. “They are our musicians. They are on break, for dinner. But soon, they will play again.”

From the vestibule, Ellen could see a second room, where several long tables and a few smaller ones had been beautifully set with white linens and lit with candles. A well stocked bar ran along the back wall. “I’ll sit in the back room. That’s where they’ll play, right?”

The hostess nodded and led Ellen to a cozy corner table. Noting the paintings of dancing Hassidim on the walls, Ellen asked, “Is this a Jewish restaurant?”

“Jewish style,” the woman said.

Ellen must have looked confused because the hostess quickly added, “It is not kosher. We have no one for that, to make it kosher. So...” She looked apologetic.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Ellen interjected. “I’m not kosher.”

The hostess smiled and handed her a menu. “Many of the tourists are disappointed with us.”

“Do many tourists know about this restaurant?” Ellen asked, slightly disappointed that tourists had found the place at all. She wanted to believe she’d discovered a bit of hidden Kraków.

“Oh, yes,” the hostess assured her. “We are well known. In fact, there is a group of Americans coming soon. You should stay.”

Normally, Ellen probably would have headed for the door at the mention of American tourists. But she wanted to hear more of her grandfather’s music. And she was lonely.

Ten minutes later, about fifteen Americans crowded into the tiny back room, stereotypically loud and aggressive about where they wanted to sit. Ellen knew them all without knowing any of them. The Uncle Mervs from New Jersey, the Sylvias from Brooklyn, the perennially searching single Debbies and Stacys, each with her own self-conscious look. But as she listened to the way they joked and complained to one another, Ellen actually felt relieved to be in the presence of people who sounded like home.

During her second course of chicken with mushrooms, the musicians filed in, bearing a viola, a bass, and an accordion. Each wore a fedora that hid his face. In their white shirts, vests, and black trousers, they looked strangely like Orthodox Jews. The bass player towered over the other two. He opened their set with a tune whose slow upbeat brought to Ellen’s mind a line of men brushing their feet off the floor in unison, their arms around each other’s shoulders. It didn’t quite sound like Jewish klezmer music. She wasn’t sure if this was because the wild, laughing clarinet was missing or because of something else.

“I heard the musicians are all goyim. Fake Jews!” one of the Americans said. The group laughed.

Ellen became annoyed with them again. “I’ll have some tea, please,” she told the waitress. One of the Mervs from New Jersey turned to her. He was a tall man, strongly built, with glasses and salt-and-pepper hair. A lawyer, she guessed. “Where you from?” he asked.

“Massachusetts. But I live in New York.”

“So do I. Upper West Side. So what’s a nice Jewish girl doing all by herself in a country like this?”

Before she could respond, he reached out his hand. “Sy Messner,” he said jovially. A few of the people seated around him turned to her and offered greetings.

Ellen smiled back, unsure whether to be pissed off that Sy Messner assumed she was Jewish or touched by the way he talked as if she was a family member. With a certain reserve, she told them about her stay in Kraków.

“We belong to Temple Beit Tikva in New York,” Sy told her. “A few of our congregants are Holocaust survivors. They wanted to return to Poland, and we came along for support. Let me tell you, I could use some support myself right now. We just spent the last six hours at Auschwitz. Have you been there yet? It’s less than an hour west of here.”

The barman suddenly lifted a menorah onto the counter and proceeded to light its seven white candles.

A woman named Esther shook her head. “Oh my God. It’s Friday night. They think they’re lighting Shabbos candles!” Looks of mocking incredulity were traded around the table.

Ellen looked away. Far from causing her offense, she thought the candles had been lit out of respect.

Soon after, the tall bass player traded his instrument for a guitar and played her grandpa’s “Foygl Tune.” Again, Ellen marveled at how he had transformed the march into a hauntingly lyrical tune, slow and soulful, but airy and somehow playful too. He had dropped in little hops so that the tune seemed to totter and almost fall, only to be caught at the last moment.

She looked up at the guitarist and was surprised to see that from under his hat, he was watching her.

The melody repeated and built speed. The guitarist turned his attention to his fingering and added decoration, folding in new melodies, new rhythms, until the tune wildly crescendoed to an end. By the time he’d finished, even the Americans had stopped talking. But the guitarist quickly left the stage, barely acknowledging their applause.

Ellen stood up and walked to the vestibule, hoping to see him.

He soon emerged from a side door. Lithe and graceful, he slid past the cluster of tables toward her.

“Do you speak English?” she asked him.

He lit a cigarette and tipped back his head, revealing a long, elegant neck and a strong jawline. “Yes, some English.”

She thought he sounded wary, but interested.

He took off his hat, and she was struck by his unusual looks—a face long and oval as a Modigliani, with dark-brown eyes and taut, pale skin. His wavy shoulder-length brown hair was combed straight back. In one ear, he wore a thin gold earring, and the middle of his chin, just below the lip, was punctuated by a reddish tuft, about the size of a dime. He eyed the row of gold hoops in Ellen’s left ear with obvious approval.

“Your music is fantastic,” she said, hoping her attraction to him wasn’t overly obvious. “I heard you practicing that last song before I came into the restaurant. You gave me a real shock. My grandfather used to sing that. Do you know anything about the tune?”

He looked at her carefully, eyed the rings in her ear again, then smiled shyly. “I don’t know what it’s called, but I like that one very much. It has something in it, I think.”

She thought he had a beautifully shaped mouth. “Where did you hear it?”

“In the street, on my way home one night. I never found the person who was playing it. But I have a good memory for tunes, and I like to research them. It is difficult work. There is not very much written down.”

Ellen tilted her head to the side and smiled up at him. “One of the people at the other table said that none of you are Jewish. Can I ask you, what makes you interested in this music?”

His expression hardened. “Must you be Austrian to be interested in Mozart?”

“Of course not.” She laughed, hoping he wouldn’t think she’d meant to insult him, although the analogy seemed odd. Everyone knew Mozart, but playing obscure Jewish music in a country without Jews just seemed strange.

“Actually,” he said, “the accordion player in our group had a Jewish grandfather.”

“Does he consider himself Jewish?”

“No.” He frowned. “He’s a Catholic, like me. We just like Jewish music.” He pursed his lips. “Of course, my parents would prefer that I play Mozart.”

“Why?”

“Because to them, this is low folk music, simple. It’s not serious. They think I am wasting my time.”

Ellen smiled. Despite the slight to Jewish culture, she sensed she was in the presence of a kindred spirit. “I know what you mean,” she said.

“The older generation, they always think this way,” he continued, clearly having given the matter considerable thought. “They want you to be a serious person so they can be proud. This isn’t music my parents know. It does not make them proud. But”—he shrugged and smiled shyly again—“I like it. I do not even know why. It feels good to play it.” He laughed, and Ellen laughed with him, enchanted by the warmth in his eyes.

“I’d love to have a tape of that tune,” she said. “Do you have a recording of it?”

“Not yet. But, if you like, I could make you a cassette. Can you come back here sometime?” He raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“I could,” Ellen said, enjoying his flirtatiousness. “That would be great!”

They smiled at each other, each knowing some kind of a beginning had been made.

“By the way, my name is Ellen Linden,” Ellen said, extending her hand.

“Mine is Marek Gruberski,” he said, returning her handshake and cupping it with his other hand. She liked the feel of his skin, smooth and intimately warm.