27

THE NEXT DAY, ELLEN WENT TO THE STUDIO TO OBSERVE THE COMPANY and to make notes on their dance styles. During a break, Pronaszko took her aside. “I think we should begin to discuss your piece. Can you meet with me this evening?”

“Of course,” Ellen said.

“Seven thirty at café Malma in Rynek Główny then. We can walk from there to a restaurant.”

At the appointed hour Ellen, armed with her spiral notebook, arrived at café Malma to find Pronaszko rolling an almost-finished glass of beer between his hands at an outdoor table. “Would my young colleague like to join me for a drink or shall we go on to dinner?” he asked.

Ellen remained standing, having noticed that he had already had a few beers. “Dinner would be great,” she said.

He swerved ever so slightly as he made his way through the maze of small tables. There weren’t many people in the square. Pronaszko led her along its eastern flank past the squat, domed church planted peculiarly in the pavement.

“I might as well ask you now,” Ellen said. “The company doesn’t seem exactly thrilled that I’m here. Is there something I should know?”

Pronaszko threw back his head dramatically and looked up at the uneven double towers of Saint Mary’s Church across the square. “They are not thrilled that you have joined us. Not thrilled at all.”

Drunk or not, his bluntness hurt her. “Why?” she said.

“They had the idea I should pick one of them to choreograph a dance, not someone from outside, especially not someone from America. I disagreed, so they are upset.” He shrugged, as if the company’s desires were merely a nuisance.

They passed a small bakery. Ellen caught a glimpse of their reflection in the glass and thought of her grandfather. He would have called her a scab, working for Pronaszko when the company wanted to do its own choreography. “You’re a parasite of the boss,” he’d have told her.

“You must understand,” Pronaszko said, “under communism we had no worthwhile cultural exchanges, nothing was permitted in the open. The country was a suffocating hole. How difficult it is to grow as an artist in such an atmosphere. My dancers don’t understand that. They are too young to understand that my job is to give them fresh air.”

Ellen studied her mentor’s profile—the short nose, the strong chin jutting out resentfully—and wasn’t sure if it would serve any useful purpose to argue with him about communism. But she was troubled by his attitude toward his dancers. “Maybe they feel they also have a right to make choices,” she said.

“And what would they choose? These are, almost all of them, children from the country. They are not city people. When I take them on tour, they stay together like sheep and don’t go out to explore the places where they have been so fortunate to have been taken. Do not be fooled by their modern clothes. If I let them, they would choose this dead, stupid Soviet ballet. That is what they know. But I know what we need. We need fresh influences, new passions. So I do not care what they want.”

“I understand what you’re saying,” Ellen said carefully. “But do you think the company will give their best creatively if they’re so angry?”

“That is for you to work out. Certainly, they will resist you. You don’t know the Polish character as I do.” He stopped and turned to her. “For all our European pretensions, we are a peasant people. Subservient. A people deformed by invasion. You want to know why they smile at you in class one minute and whisper about you the next? It is because they are all two-faced servants.” His eyes flitted up to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz as Ellen tried to recall when the dancers were whispering about her.

“Ellen.” He ran his forefinger back and forth over the length of his nose. He seemed hesitant. “You remember your improvisation of the statue, of Adam Mickiewicz?”

She rolled her eyes. “That was a big mistake.”

“No. I have given this some thought. You have a sense. You could not have chosen better, even without knowing him. Mickiewicz is the national poet, yes. Ask any schoolchild. And this is because when the nations around us cut us into parts and made Poland disappear from the map of Europe, we needed to believe in the poems of this man, our Polish patriot.” He squinted, as if appraising the statue in Rynek Główny. “But the truth is our national poet lived abroad most of his life. He died in Istanbul. The statue of him in the main square, that is our little Polish joke. Because Mickiewicz was never in his life in Kraków.” He lowered his voice, as if others might be listening. “And the rest of the joke? That is for you to enjoy. Now that our communist friends are not rewriting history anymore, I can tell you that it has long been believed that our Polish Shakespeare, our hero to the faithful, had a Jewish mother. Ha! There is something they did not tell us when we were memorizing Pan Tadeusz!”

Ellen was conscious of holding her breath, of not wanting to misspeak in the face of a man’s rebuke of his own people.

But Pronaszko apparently did not share her sense of delicacy. “We are becoming free to say the truth,” he said, with some belligerence. “And truth can be very difficult for Polish people. We operate in the fantasy of ourselves.”

Ellen didn’t think there was a politic way to respond to this, so she merely offered a smile.

He gave her a wink. “Nothing is what it seems, yes?”

She nodded weakly at this man with whom she still felt so awkward.

He took her by the elbow and began walking again. “They do not like strangers. What they don’t know is that they need them. The stranger will teach them who they are. Hundreds of years ago, strangers built our economy. Our princes, our King Kazimierz Wielki invited them to come here, from Germany mostly. Just as I invited you.”

Ellen was unsure how much of this speech was being randomly driven by drink and how much was his trying to tell her something he thought was important.

“And ever since the Jews left this country, we have suffered, even though some of them who survived were very powerful in the government. Jewish communists are the worst, you know. They really believe.”

She felt the pressure of his fingers along her arm, and prickles ran up and down her spine. She remembered her father’s warning not to tell Pronaszko that she was Jewish. But was he an anti Semite? What did he mean, she wondered, by the phrase “since the Jews left”? Had he meant the Jews who had emigrated, like her grandfather, at the turn of the century, or was he referring to the Holocaust? And if he meant the Holocaust, how could he call that leaving?

At that peculiar moment, she noticed that the taller of Saint Mary’s two towers was ringed by a gilded royal crown. It made her think of the odd phrase on the plaque in Szeroka Square—“sixty five thousand Polish citizens of Jewish nationality.” She hadn’t been able to articulate what had bothered her about it. But now, looking at the tower, she realized that in a country where church and state were one, a Polish Jew was regarded as having a different nationality. She felt cold.

They turned off the square, onto the narrow stone sidewalks of a side street, and headed toward Malٹ Rynek, the small market square behind Saint Mary’s. Ellen listened to the rhythm of their feet on the pavement and worked hard at pulling herself together so that she could face what she knew was going to be a difficult dinner.

“Ah, well.” Pronaszko sighed, waving their subject away. “All this is for another day. Tonight, perhaps I am more pessimistic than usual.” He guided her toward a wood-gated doorway, which led to a rough cubbyhole of a restaurant. “The food here is excellent,” he said, dismissing the plain surroundings with the easy manner of a connoisseur.

The restaurant’s owner, a short man with a mustached face as round and red as an apple, greeted Pronaszko with excited deference and seated them at a center table where, unfortunately for Ellen, the cigarette smoke seemed thickest. The place was crowded with locals, a few of whom stared at Pronaszko, then at Ellen. Pronaszko leaned toward her and said softly, “You see, some of us recognize an interesting beauty when we see one!”

Ellen took this as encouragement, not as a come on. “Thanks.” She smiled and examined the jeans and thick soled black shoes on the young Poles at the next table, wondering if Pronaszko’s dancers didn’t have a point in objecting to an outsider choreographing for them. Maybe it wasn’t outside influences they needed. From New York to Kraków, everyone was starting to dress alike, as if they were all shopping in the same friends’ closets. In a way, there was something sweet about it, but she had an uncomfortable sense they might all be surrendering too much of themselves.

“I’ll order you the beetroot soup and the pierogi. They are specialties here. You will like it.” Pronaszko called the owner over and with great élan, and without asking her permission, ordered their dinner. She was offended but, for the sake of the subject they were about to discuss, she let it pass.

“How do I get your dancers to loosen up and try things?” she asked him.

“This is their problem,” he said, frowning. “They know same, same, same. No color, no variety. I wanted you to make them see how you use improvisation in your choreographic work, to show them the process.”

Ellen smiled, relieved to know the reason he had chosen her to do the first improvisation. “How do you get to the point where you don’t mind their resentment?” she asked.

“You ignore it. You do what is best for the company, for its art. You do not need them to like you. You need them to work so that they learn to live with the terror of creativity.”

She laughed at his dramatics. “And you call yourself an anti-communist?”

He answered with what she thought of as the European continental smile, head bowed in a show of false modesty, while the eyes reveal a practiced cynicism. “So, what do you have in mind for us?” he said, jerking his head up suddenly and returning to his professional demeanor.

She pulled out her notebook and began to flip nervously through the pages. “The piece I worked on for you in New York is called Four Corners. It has the sound of something very basically American to me, like the old town squares up in New England, or an Amish quilt pattern, or square dancing. I like the idea of superimposing that on a Polish sensibility. Obviously, a lot will get influenced by the way your dancers move.”

Pronaszko nodded slightly.

“My idea is to pull images and sounds of very different types of people from the four corners of the stage. They appear successively, each interacting with one or more of the other corners. I have three hip hop types coming together with a superslow whirling dervish, each with their own music. There’s interplay with the music too. You get one style, one beat, then the other. The volume of each musical identity goes up and down and fuses as they interact.”

Pronaszko’s eyebrows rose, but Ellen couldn’t yet tell if he was interested. “I have leaping, tumbling gymnastic types who dance to Japanese Kodo music. They come together with smooth, gliding types, dancing to country western music. The whole piece plays with the idea of diversity.”

Pronaszko played absentmindedly with his silverware. “Unfortunately, I do not believe in the melting pot,” he said, sniffing. “I like the title Four Corners. It evokes something. But to just introduce types and treat them like puppets, what is the point? This sort of thing is done all the time. I don’t like it. I think we should try for something bigger.”

Ellen wasn’t prepared to have him brush off her work without more discussion, but she liked that he was pushing her. “Not big enough?” she repeated, amused. She took a sip of water.

Pronaszko sighed and pulled out a cigarette. When their dinner arrived, he became more interested in extolling the virtues of the sour beetroot soup with minced meat raviolis—ears, he called them—and the wild mushroom pierogis, than he was in hearing about the thought process behind her work. He cut a pierogi in half and pushed it around his plate. Then he put down his fork. “I want to hear a point of view,” he said slowly. “I want to hear a cry of passion, a subject from your soul. You talk about types. I am not interested in types for types’ sake. I did not bring you here to play with mere concepts. That is for the timid.” He slammed his open palm on the table, jangling the silverware, startling her. “I am interested in evoking response.”

“Response to what?”

“That is for you to decide.”

A silence fell between them. Pronaszko studied her face. “Ellen Linden, I chose you because you have a certain pure American fire. You do not know how that looks to us, how exciting, how alive. You have that gift of passion without intellectual self-consciousness. We cannot get enough of that here.”

Ellen was surprised to hear a European admit this.

“All right.” He lifted his hand slightly from the table and returned the two of them to a lesser state of tension. He pointed his forefinger at her. “I want something new out of you. I want something freshly dug.” He returned to his food, stabbed a few pierogi, and bit them off his fork. “When you have worked out an idea and you want to see how it looks on some dancers, let me know.”

Ellen realized she would have to start over. The pressure felt like a knee against her spine. Yet she was exhilarated.

They exchanged careful smiles.

“How about a vodka?” he said.

How confidently she raises her glass and drinks to him in Polish. This Ellen Linden is no fool. Not for her to make herself sick with vodka like her grandfather. Poor soul, trying to impress Hillel and that Pole Piotr in Warsaw.