34

ELLEN WAS AT THE STUDIO THE NEXT MORNING AN HOUR BEFORE the dancers arrived. She rolled down the waistband of her black nylon sweatpants, faced the mirrored wall, and fastened on her Walkman. The “For-a-GirlTune” began slowly and quietly, like a shy lover entering an unfamiliar bed. Playing it in the studio lent it a forbidden quality. She rolled her shoulder, extended an arm, and followed the tune’s slow opening, looking for dance phrases to wrap around its beat. Then she sat down with a bottle of water and listened to the tape again, eyes closed, her head leaning against the mirror. She realized she really wasn’t sure what the tune meant, what she might want to say with it. A warm breeze blew the back of her neck, startling her because it felt so like a breath. She shrugged off the sensation, turned off the tape, and began to make choreographic notes. Looking at the movement on paper, she was reminded of Pronaszko’s warning not to make movement just for movement’s sake.

The birds cooed at the windowsill. Step back, she told herself. Get moving with the company. Maybe they’ll have some useful ideas. She didn’t usually work this way. Usually, she choreographed a piece with the music and taught it to dancers, or she worked it out directly on their bodies, incorporating their individual styles into the music as they went along.

Pronaszko arrived just as she was returning the tape to her backpack.

“I’d like some time with the dancers today,” she said. She was tempted to play the “For-a-GirlTune” for him, just to see how he would react to it. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Like new love, it was too delicate to share yet.

With his usual detached good humor, Pronaszko told her, “Whatever you need.”

When the dancers were assembled, he took them through a warm up. Then he straddled a backward facing chair and fisted his hands under his chin. “Ellen has some work for us,” he said in English.

She dumped out her bag of tapes and came to the front of the room. “Let’s do some contact improvisation,” she said. “Approach someone. Feel your hips. Get down. Get earthy.” She threw a Zap Mama tape in and turned up the volume on the boom box. For forty-five minutes she pushed the dancers hard to move in ways that were clearly uncomfortable for them. She had them try hip-hop and jazz moves, samba, anything she could think of to pull them away from their tendency to move with stiff spines and turned-out walks.

The results were mixed. At best, they took her instruction as sanction for them to dance the way they did in clubs. At worst, they threw away their technique altogether and flopped about looking pained and awkward.

Tomek, Joanna, and Henryk milled shyly against the long dirty windows and nodded to some Ziggy Marley music. Midsong, they stepped forward to the center of the sun-striped floor, looked to one another for support, and began to bounce alternate shoulders with one another as if on a trampoline.

There’s a start, Ellen thought. If nothing else, she had the sense that they were finally connecting with what she was asking them to do. When class ended, quite a few of the dancers called to her a good-natured “Get down!” in thick Polish accents as they left the studio.

Pronaszko gave her a short, approving nod and slipped out the door. She was about to ask him to wait for her, when Jacek popped his head from behind the changing screen. “We are going for a coffee and something to eat. Will you come with us?”

“I’d love to,” she said, delighted to be asked.

“That was very good music.” He smiled. “We will wait for you.”

And indeed, when she opened the studio door, she found Jacek, Henryk, and Genia smoking on the landing.

“What about Andrzej?” she asked Jacek. It worried her that she might not be able to communicate without his translations.

Jacek looked at his watch. “Oh, I think now he is with that German boy he met at the Czartoryski Museum. He stands at the paintings of naked men and talks to the foreign visitors. He knows who he is looking for.”

Henryk and Genia gave each other knowing looks.

For Ellen, this was the first hint that perhaps Andrzej was not the beloved leader she’d taken him for, that his constant peddling of himself might annoy them as much as it did her. It was a relief. So was hearing these three speak English.

The little group descended the marble stairs single file, past the nearly toothless cleaning woman whose chatter Ellen could not understand at all. They followed Jacek down to the street. The three Poles jostled one another good naturedly on the narrow sidewalk. Ellen smiled. Henryk whistled.

They stopped at an unmarked door, behind which a steep, uneven stone stairway led them down to a dark, fairly small, but beautiful cellar Café with arched brick walls. The place was packed with students and afloat in cigarette smoke. Ellen’s group settled at a corner table lit with candles. They ordered coffee.

“You are fortunate we do not speak English like Maria speaks Polish,” Henryk said.

“Who’s Maria?” Ellen asked.

He puckered his mouth and did a perfect imitation of the cleaning woman.

She wouldn’t have guessed that Maria was unintelligible to them too. She laughed, feeling at ease at last. “You all speak English so well,” she said. “Why do we need Andrzej as a translator?”

They looked at one another. Genia giggled. “Our English is not so good,” she said, drawing in her chin coquettishly.

They all nodded in agreement and drank their gritty, Polish-style coffee.

Ellen turned to Genia. “Are you all from different parts of the country?”

Genia tipped back her head delicately and smiled, close lipped. “I think so, yes. Jacek is from Lower Silesia, near Wrocl١w. Henryk is from near Lٯmz¥a. I am from near Gdańsk.”

Ellen remembered that Pronaszko said they were from small towns. “Everyone is from near somewhere then?”

“Except Andrzej,” Genia said. “Of course, he is from Warsaw.”

The dancers all laughed at this.

“He seems like a big-city boy,” Ellen said gravely, hoping she had gotten the joke.

“Oh, yes,” Genia said, opening her eyes wide and nodding agreeably. “He likes boys very much.”

They all laughed again, Ellen less comfortably. She was unused to hearing such homophobia among dancers.

“Hey, when did those guys start coming in here?” Jacek said, nodding in the direction of two blue-uniformed men.

“Are those policemen?” Ellen asked him, wondering if she should be concerned.

“I am not sure. There are only two of them.”

Ellen didn’t understand why the Poles thought this funny.

Henryk glanced at the policemen and leaned toward her, his eyes bright with mischief. “It is an old joke. Why do policemen always go in threes?”

“Why?” Ellen said.

“One reads, one writes, and one guards these two intellectuals.”

Ellen laughed, so he followed up with half a dozen more stupid policemen jokes, punctuated by Genia’s stilted but helpful explanations. When he paused to light up yet another cigarette, Genia raised herself in her chair, her face fairly aglow. In her little-girl voice, she asked, “How do you take census in Polish village?”

“How?” they said in unison.

“You roll a złoty down the street, you count the legs, divide this by two, and subtract one for the dirty little yd who steals it.”

Ellen felt as if the room had just sunk under water. The ambient sounds became distorted, and everything seemed to float. She stared at the faces of the happy dancers, looking for clues to how they could continue to smile after what they had just heard. Pan Bergson ten yd? she heard the woman in Zokof ask again.

She pushed back her chair and stood slowly, uncertain of her balance. “I have to go,” she said, throwing a handful of zlotys on the table. “I forgot, I have an appointment.”

The Poles seemed somewhat taken aback, but they nodded understandingly and said good-bye.

Ellen zigzagged her way between the tables and scrambled up the perilous stairway two steps at a time. Once outside, she took off down the street, her distress increasingly fired by adrenaline. Idiots. She began to mutter, not caring about the looks she got from passersby. “Fuck them. I should have told them a Polish joke. I should have said most Americans only know Poles by jokes. Like hey, Jacek, what’s a Polish firing squad? A circle. Ha! Oh, not laughing? You don’t think Poles are stupid? Does that make you feel like the dirty little Jew?” She was practically running now, enfolded in her manic, but strangely seductive, anger. By the time she arrived at her hotel room, she was out of breath.

The Tanakh still lay on her night table. She ran her hand tentatively down its spine, wondering what part of this book gave the world the idea that a Jew is a cartoon, dirty and little. She pulled the book protectively to her chest, physically pained by Jacek, Henryk, and Genia’s betrayal. She’d refused to believe they weren’t as modern as they dressed. Who in her generation would ever think like that, much less say things like they did?

A couple of curls had come loose from her topknot, and she twirled them around her finger. If only she’d done something, made a point. Now she knew she would never again feel entirely at ease with them.

She pulled the cassette of the “For-a-GirlTune” from her dance bag and turned it over in her hand. If she played it for them now, it would require explanation. She would have to protect it from their ideas about Jews. How would she tell them why she had chosen it? Because she would have to explain it, even if this was an unusual thing for a choreographer to do.

She rose from the bed and made circles on the floor with her toe, remembering her unsatisfying experiments with the music that morning. This could be another Adam Mickiewicz debacle, she realized. If she faked it, playing with material she knew nothing about, they’d know. She felt like an adoptive mother, not quite knowing how, or whether, she had the right to claim a baby she didn’t know how to handle. She felt helplessly inadequate.

The wind blew through the open window, flaring one of the long curtain sheers like a woman’s skirt. She pressed the cassette tape to her lips and inhaled.

I really love this music, she thought. She exhaled. The curtain fluttered to her face like a veil, and she rubbed it reassuringly against her cheek.