43

ELLEN AND MAREK HEADED WEST OUT OF ZOKOF, THROUGH streets of houses fenced with chain link, each with their lacy curtain sheers hanging like a national flag across the front windows. Ellen wondered what remained of the town her grandfather had known. The blotches of grass riddled with footpaths? The slammed-on room additions of brick, stucco, wood, and stone? Her ancestral home depressed her. Her only real regret about leaving was Rafael.

When they’d parted, he’d walked them to the threshold of his house and had stood anxiously, clasping and unclasping his knotted hands. “Elleneh,” he’d said. “Write and tell me what’s what.”

She’d kept herself from offering him the impropriety of an embrace. “I’ll write you,” she promised again. “Don’t worry.”

He’d shrugged and turned to Marek. “Don’t worry. What does this mean?” Then, with all the awkwardness of a man long out of the habit of hand-shaking, he stuck out his hand. “Marek, it was a blessing, what you did today,” he said earnestly. “Our rabbis taught that by their deeds all men are equal in the eyes of God, and by their good deeds they bring God’s presence into the world.” He nodded, his eyes full of feeling. “Today, you brought God’s presence into the world. You are a good boy, a mensch.”

Marek had taken Rafael’s hand in his own, then clasped his other hand on top, pumping it warmly. “Thank you, Mr. Bergson,” he said quietly.

To Ellen, the moment had felt suspended and holy.

“Come back when you can,” Rafael had said to them both. “My house has an open door.” He’d seemed almost cheery then, but the mention of his door had only heightened Ellen’s sense of his vulnerability.

Twenty minutes later, they were on the two lane highway approaching Radom. The rain had stopped. The sun needled its way through the clouds. Zokof had disappeared behind them, its western border marked only by a line of trees at the end of the plain. Ellen slid the “For-a-GirlTune” cassette off the dashboard and held it protectively between her palms.

“I see you are thinking,” Marek said carefully.

She tilted the tip of the cassette to her chin. “There were holes in the blanket on his bed,” she said, more to herself than to him. “And those sheets. I have to get him new bedding.”

“He does not need a new blanket in July,” Marek said. “In the winter, he has an eiderdown cover. Everyone has such a cover.” He glanced at her and, perhaps, seeing her consternation, softened his tone. “This is how people in the countryside live. It is a difficult life. You are looking with American eyes. To them, it is no problem.”

Ellen didn’t feel like arguing. She had only mentioned the bedding as a passing thought. “I guess I just can’t help being an American.” She sighed.

Playfully, he chucked her under the chin. “I like that,” he said.

The day had begun to take its toll on her. She closed her eyes to rest, but the more she thought about it, the more it bothered her that Rafael should not even hope for a new blanket, that he should be content, in this day and age, to ruin his eyes reading Talmud by kerosene lamp, that he should have to put up with the difficulties of his kitchen stove, even if other people brought him wood and coal. She pushed the cassette into the recorder.

At the first rhythmic notes of the tune, Marek began to tap his fingers on the wheel. Ellen opened her eyes and found him looking at her, as if trying to gauge her mood. She tickled his ear.

For the next few miles, they talked about Kraków’s summer concerts, using any excuse to brush against each other’s skin, to stroke each other’s knees and arms and shoulders. Soon they drifted into a comfortable silence. Ellen played with a lock of hair at the back of Marek’s neck. The tune was still playing. She listened to it more closely, certain that Marek’s arrangement would play well to a young audience. The tense rhythm was modern, edgy. It provoked a certain anxiety she liked. She admired how he’d arranged the original tune to appear high above the musical landscape, like the comet on which Freidl’s father’s voice rode. How had he caught that sense of something bright sinking into the fray until it disappeared? She stopped the tape. “When we were at the Ariel Café, you said you heard prayers in the notes. What made you think of that?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “I listened to the music.”

“But what makes it a prayer?” she insisted. “What takes it to that next step, beyond something merely beautiful?”

He laughed nervously, as if he was afraid she might mock him. “It is like complete pouring out.” He squinted and shook his head.

Ellen sensed, once again, that there was something impoverished about the atheist worldview with which she’d been raised. She turned the tape player back on and realized, not without shame, that she envied what he knew about faith, and that she was jealous of the authenticity he’d accomplished with music she had more right to own than he did. She looked out the window, realizing that her dance would have to be poured out of her, and that the pouring would require resistance to her natural urge to think.

They passed a roadside shrine of a blue-robed Virgin Mary decorated with flowers and long ribbons. Primitive, her mother would have called it, meaning colorful, delightful to us, but ultimately childish. Her father would have agreed. Now Ellen saw instead an adornment that marked the transformation of an earthly place into a doorway to God, and she understood it. She thought of the other ribbon, the one that had once tied back the copper hair of her great-aunt Hindeleh. It now lay between the pages of her little blue prayer book, hidden as her grandpa Isaac had kept it. She dug her nails into a seam on the armrest, angered by her grandfather’s secrecy, by his refusal to listen to anyone but himself. But for this, he would have heard the tune and Freidl’s prayer—Every blade of grass has its own guardian star in the firmament which strikes it and commands it to grow! Let a spark be lit in him and let him grow!

He had an uncooked soul, Freidl had said. Ellen refused to allow this as an excuse. He could have listened. He could have grown. He could have spared Freidl the pain of waiting through two generations to return to her grave in peace. She was sickened by the thought that her own inability to hear the prayers in the tune suggested she was just as uncooked as her grandfather and father. “Before I leave Poland, I’m going to finish Freidl’s memorial,” she said.

Marek’s eyes didn’t waver from the road. “When are you leaving?”

“I can’t stay too long after the performance. I have a grant to do a new piece this fall.” The words slid out so quickly. Not until she glanced at him, saw his pursed lips, did she regret having spoken so casually. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to going.”

He looked at her. “Yes, well, I never thought you are the kind of American who would like to live here in Poland. The Americans I see who stay in Kraków are mostly confused. They think being here, behind the old Iron Curtain, is enough to make them interesting to people back home. But what is that, Ellen, to be someplace without a purpose, only because it might be more unusual than Paris?” He shrugged dismissively, in a manner that reminded her of Rafael.

“Maybe you’ll come visit me in New York,” she suggested, hoping he would promise her right then that he would.

He twisted a piece of loose thread off his shirt cuff and nodded. “Maybe. I would like that.”

She wasn’t sure if this was just talk or if they were making a plan. She looked at his musician’s hands, so delicate on the wheel. It would be no different for him in New York than it would be for her in Kraków. If he came to stay he’d be just another foreigner, driving a cab, with an occasional music gig. And even that was doubtful. What did a Polish klezmer player have to offer in a city of real Jewish musicians? And how would she see him in America, where his Polishness would be highlighted? Did it really not matter to her now that he wasn’t Jewish, as good as he was, and as committed to her? Her enthusiasm for his visit became confused, and she sank into sadness. She stared at his hands, remembering how good they’d felt when he’d spread them over her naked back and down her sides, how well those fingers knew her. She would miss the way he handled her, his confidence in bed, his smell, his lips at her neck.

They arrived at the hotel. Marek parked the Fiat. “I hate that I have to work tonight,” he said.

Ellen held his head between her hands. “Come upstairs.”

They walked hand in hand down the street and up to her room, where he closed the curtains on the side that faced the apartment across the narrow street.

Ellen went to him, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him. They made love until evening.

“What will you do tonight, after I am gone?” he asked.

Ellen sighed. “I’ll work. I have to. There’s so much to put together. I have all these elements, but they’re like body parts. They’re not connected. They’re not alive. You know what I mean?”

He smiled and brushed a stray curl from her forehead. “What are your elements?”

“I have the tune, of course, and Freidl, Miriam’s timbrel from the Bible, and proverbs.” She sighed again, this time to allay her growing anxiety, and rolled over on her back. “There’s a line that keeps floating into my head. I don’t know where it comes from, if I read it or whatever. It goes, ‘They have hardened their hearts to each other, like Pharaoh in Egypt, each seeing and feeling only their own martyrdom.’”

Marek turned on his side to her. “There is only one way for martyred peoples to care about each other.”

“How?”

He smiled and placed his hand on her left breast. They both felt her heartbeat. He took her hand and placed it on his chest. “Here, in the spaces between words, where there is God.”

She slapped him gently. “You’re a hopeless romantic.”

He laughed. “Of course. I am Polish. We are romantics.”

When the hejnal/struck eight, Marek said he had to leave. “I will call you,” he promised.

They got out of bed, and she held him close.

After he’d left, she dozed off again. She had an image of Marek, his eyes closed, performing the tune on the violin, praying. It woke her up. She threw on a robe, took out her notebook, and wrote down one word. Pour. Then she opened her nightstand drawer, took out the Tanakh, and turned to the book of Zechariah. She took out her great-aunt Hindeleh’s ribbon and ran it through her fingers, scanning the page until she came to a passage where God said, “Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?” She remembered how Rafael had recited this question at the lamppost in the cemetery.

She fingered the page, knowing she had found the title of her piece.

The next day, before she went to the studio, Ellen called her mother in Cambridge.

“Mom, I need you to send me the broken gravestone Dad kept in his study,” she said.

“Why, dear? I thought we would display it in the living room, in honor of Dad’s trip to Poland.”

Ellen wasn’t sure how much to explain. She knew she had to be cautious when speaking to her mother about her relationship with everything to do with Zokof, and that to mention religion would only lead to argument. She didn’t want to have to defend opinions she wasn’t sure she was committed to. But she was certain about the gravestone. “It doesn’t belong in our living room, Mom,” she said. “It’s disrespectful.”

“Then why was it given to Dad?”

“Rafael thought it was safer in America, but he and I have talked about it now and I think Dad would agree it belongs here.”

There was a short pause on the other end of the line. “Well, all right, if that’s what you’ve decided. What would you like me to do?”

Ellen appreciated her mother’s respect in not arguing any further. “Can you FedEx it so it gets here ASAP? And be sure it’s shipped at their highest level of care, whatever it costs.”

“Okay,” her mother promised.

When she got off the phone, Ellen pulled out her book on Jewish gravestones and began to consider symbols she wanted to add to the gravestone’s new center. The text, she hoped, would come to her when she began to work with the stonemason.

All through the week Ellen worked on her dance. She found that the more she put her notebook aside and let the images she had written there flow through her head and into her body, the more the piece seemed to organize itself. When she had a fair number of choreographed sections in place, she set up a meeting with Pronaszko. The piece wasn’t finished. She just hoped that what she had assembled would hold.

“The dance is called A Day of Small Beginnings,” she said. “I took the title from the Book of Zechariah. God asks, ‘Does anyone scorn a day of small beginnings?’” She glanced at him quickly and decided against elaborating further.

He listened, head bowed thoughtfully, as she told him she’d be using Polish and Yiddish proverbs along with ambient sounds, also Polish folk and jazz music in addition to the klezmer tune he’d heard at the studio. “The piece is in four parts,” she said. “It juxtaposes Polish and Jewish images and evokes the difficulties of the relationship between the two peoples.”

He nodded in his measured way, seemingly undisturbed by the subject, as he had been when she’d introduced it to him weeks before.

She was nervous. “I have musicians,” she said. “They’re the only ones who can do the klezmer tune.”

“That is fine, if their price is reasonable. I like what I am hearing. You have something nicely elusive here,” he said, fluttering his fingers. “But with substance.”

She tried to suppress her almost giddy relief that he was pleased.

Straightening his back, Pronaszko raised his head imperiously. “You have read the Book of Zechariah,” he said. “You must remember the rest.”

Ellen had not expected him to be familiar with the Bible.

“In Zechariah,” he said, “God promises there will be other people, citizens of great cities, who will come to seek Him in Jerusalem. ‘Ten men of nations of every language, He says, will take Jews by the sleeve and say, we want to go with you, since God is with you.’”

He eyed her like a prankster and said, “When I was a young man, I studied for the priesthood. But...Terpsichore seduced me instead.” He sat back and laughed, enjoying her surprise. “I was always taken by those words from Zechariah. They made for much discussion among the seminarians after the war, when the Jews were almost gone. Now tell me, what will we need for sets?” He lifted his chin expectantly.

She was tempted to ask what the seminarians had said, tempted to tell him why the phrase appealed to her, but she did not want her creative confidence rocked by the notion that he knew more than she did about the very phrase that would ignite her work. She told him she wanted to perform the piece in Szeroka Square, and he suggested they make a date with his set designer.

He pushed back his chair. “I think this is a day of good beginnings.” He smiled. “The rest I will see with the company. In these next weeks, as we begin to work, I promise you I will be very hard on you and the company. But now, when we are still on speaking terms, I think it is a good time for me to say I believe I made a good choice in you.” He rose.

“Thanks,” she said, hoping she did not appear as overwhelmed as she felt. “We can begin next Monday.”

“Monday is good.” He shook her hand as they parted this time, like colleagues.

I watch and am astonished. Is this a midrash in dance she wants to make of our story, a teasing out of meaning from Torah? I do not understand. But in my blue emptiness I feel a change, movement like the rise of a wave.