44

THE GRAVESTONE, WRAPPED PRECIOUSLY WELL, ARRIVED UNHARMED from Cambridge. For a long time, Ellen held it in her lap, tracing the Hebrew letters she could not read, wondering if the words inscribed on its rough gray surface did justice to the woman it memorialized. The stone was heavy, roughly two inches thick and about two and a half feet high. She leaned it against the wall on top of her bureau and studied it for a long time, regretting that she had not paid it more attention after her father’s death.

That evening, she called Marek at the Ariel Café to tell him the news. “We need to meet with your stonemason,” she said.

“I have already spoken to him. He was very interested to do this work. You must show him what it is you want him to do.”

“I’m working on the design, and I’ll have the text ready soon too. But, Marek, what about the cemetery wall? When will you be able to build it?”

“After your performance, I will have more time.” There was a pause on the line. “You understand, I must work. I cannot be there every day.” He spoke haltingly, as if he would have preferred to promise her it could be done in a week or two, as she might have wanted to hear.

Ellen had a bad feeling that rebuilding a stone wall around a cemetery could take months. “What if we get people to help? What about Stefan or Pawel?”

“Maybe. But I do not think they can come often. And they may not want to. It is difficult to ask musicians to do work that is not good for the hands. That is their living.”

“I understand,” she said, appreciating that it was his living too. “You know, maybe I should call the Lauder Foundation in Warsaw about it. They might have volunteers for this kind of thing.” She felt better for having thought of it, especially since her father had been the one who had suggested the foundation to her. “It’s worth a shot.”

“No, no. I promised Rafael I will build the wall, and I will build it.”

“But it could take a long time, Marek. I have to get back to New York for the fall.”

“It will be done. I promise.”

It was clear he did not want her to question him any further about how he was going to accomplish this. She decided it was best to trust him. Before going to sleep, she sat at the end of her bed and stared again at the gravestone. That night, it appeared in her dreams, but when she awoke, it was the space between the two pieces that she thought about. She imagined the upper piece suspended in a frame over the lower one, with some kind of mortar filling the gap between them.

The following night she dreamed she was standing under a dome formed by huge gravestones. She could see the blue sky through the cracks, and Freidl, alone, outside. Ellen ran to her and reached to her through the cracks. But the stones were thicker than her arms were long. She awoke, distraught.

Over the weekend, she met Marek and the stonemason ukasz Rakowski at a milk bar on Grodzka Street in the Central District. He was a heavyset man, short, with a head of thick hair that rose at an angle to his head. His palms and fingers were callused but warm, and reassuring to Ellen when they shook hands.

She laid out the sketch she had made of the top and bottom halves of the gravestone, separated by a cut-out area in which, she explained to him, a new stone should float. “I’ll need you to engrave the new stone with text and to carve these symbols,” she said, pointing to her drawings. “Can you do that?”

ukasz studied the drawing and rubbed his hands together. Then he touched the page and traced rough shapes with his thick fingers, as if trying to get the feel of what she wanted.

“Her name is Miriam?” he asked Marek in Polish.

Ellen understood the question. Stunned, she asked him how he had guessed the name.

“Usually, the musical instruments are for Miriam,” he said, pointing to the timbrel Ellen had drawn.

Ellen didn’t need to ask him if he was Jewish. She looked at him. He met her gaze briefly and looked back at the drawing.

“Tell him I would be honored if he would do the work on this gravestone for us,” she said to Marek. “Tell him I’ll send him the text in the mail next week. Then if he’ll send me back a draft of what the whole thing will look like, we’ll be on our way. But tell him I need it to be finished by the first week of September. I’m leaving on the fifth.”

Marek glanced at her before translating.

ukasz agreed to her requirements. They came to terms about the price, and he rolled up her drawing to take with him.

“I’m going to miss the gravestone,” she told Marek.

“This gives you reason to return to Poland.” He smiled.

“Oh, I’ll be back to Poland.”

“It is a difficult place to leave,” he said.

She realized there were several conflicting ways to interpret this remark. Such were the delicacies of the nation, she thought.

When ukasz had left them, Marek seemed at a loss. He asked her how the dancing, as he put it, was going.

Ellen, not wishing to revisit the subject of her leaving, rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I made the mistake of asking the company what they thought of the tune when I played it for them. You know what they said? ‘We’re doing a Jew’s dance?’ It seems they don’t like the subject. ‘This is not what we’re thinking about in Poland today,’ they said.” Her eyes hurt from having stayed up three nights, working and reworking the piece, sliding in and out of the feeling that it was losing its flow, its balance, maybe its whole point.

“Maybe you could have them for a coffee,” Marek suggested. “Maybe talk could help out the situation.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have time for group therapy here. I’m up to my neck working with the sets and lighting and everything. You have no idea how much time all this takes. They’re just jerks.” Her voice cracked. She hadn’t realized she was this upset. She put her head down on the table so no one could see the tears that had sprung from her eyes faster than she could stop them.

Marek reached over and stroked her hair.

Ellen balanced her chin on the backs of her hands and looked up at him. “The truth is I don’t know what’s upsetting me more, them or me. I am making them do this Jewish dance, and what do I know about it? I feel like a fake, like I’m using other people’s information, pasting it all together. I have scraps of paper all over my bed with elements I need to get into the dance, but I can’t choreograph what’s in my heart, because my heart isn’t organized and it doesn’t know where it’s going.” She exhaled against the tightness that was corseting her torso. “I don’t know how to tie it all together. It’s scaring me. Every night I think of Freidl and how I can’t let her down, and I can’t sleep. My heart pounds like I’m going to have an attack. It’s crazy. That’s how my father died.” She looked up. Her tears puddled and overflowed over the lower rims of her eyes.

Marek wiped them away with his thumbs so that anyone looking at them would have thought he was merely caressing her cheeks. “Maybe you should talk to God,” he said.

She looked at him as if he were mad.

“Just talk, like to a friend. Tell Him everything, even the things you are afraid to say out loud, especially those. And do not stop talking, even when you do not think there is anything left to say. Because then you will begin to say it again, and it will be more clear. God can help you, if you let Him.”

She wasn’t ready to accept this, even from him. It sounded like something a missionary would say. She stuck with the problem at hand. “If I give them exact instructions, they’re fine,” she said, sniffing. “You know, like lean out, keep your shoulders down, that sort of thing. But that’s not enough. They’re supposed to be setting a mood. They give me blank faces.”

He nodded understandingly.

“So finally, I lost it with them. I said, it doesn’t matter if this isn’t your subject, you make it yours.”

He got up, came around behind her, and massaged her neck and shoulders.

“Thanks,” she said, even though a stinging shiver had just run from a vertebra in her neck to her tailbone. The day was coming when they would part. Her mouth tasted like chalk.

“Then we rehearsed and I got so impatient with them, I think I just made them feel ashamed that they were terrible dancers.” She took a sip of water.

Marek returned to his seat. “If you know how you want them to dance, then you must insist they follow you. That is all.” He looked serious now. “Polish people are different from Americans. There is nothing we will not argue about all night, all day, from every side. But when it comes to doing something, making something, yes? Well, then we have trouble. Then you see, we are all argument, no action, no discipline, no organization. Any Pole will tell you that, all night, all day, from every side.”

His grin surprised her.

“So when an American says to us, make this yours, be brave, just do it, we come full stop. We want to do our best. But most of the time, we do not know what to do, how to begin. So we do nothing. And then we may discuss how we are doing nothing. We make promises we do not keep. Then we make like we are heroes, defending our doing nothing. After this, we tell you, poor American, you cannot possibly understand us, because the problem is so Polish.” He was laughing now.

How could she be upset when he had such beautiful white teeth?

“Come, we must have a drink,” he said. “That is so Polish too.”

They left the milk bar and went back to her room, where Marek produced from his shoulder bag a bottle of vodka, with a long blade of grass in it. She took out two glasses, and they drank to dancers and musicians and Poles and Americans. He drank much more than she did, much more than anyone she knew would drink. And somewhere between his becoming slightly high and too close to drunk, she again began to doubt how well she really knew him, even if he could step out of his Polishness enough to see it from her side.

They spent the night together, but he fell asleep soon after they got into bed. She lay awake in the dark, turned her back to him, and buried her disappointment in him by visualizing the dance from beginning to end. She kept rearranging elements, adding and deleting parts, but it was the content that bothered her. There was a lack of focus she did not know how to fix.

That night she dreamed of her grandfather. He was a figure in a painting, posed in his upholstered armchair, his face turned toward the outline of a window in the Brownsville apartment. The rest of the canvas was unfilled. She awoke, disturbed at having seen him so flat and unfinished. A question came to her, as if someone had given it to her for dictation, and she wrote it down in her notebook: What did we lose, what was left behind, once Miriam’s timbrel stopped shaking and we found ourselves alone in the land of milk and honey?

In the morning, Marek awoke full of apologies for having abandoned her the night before. “We Poles drink too much. It is our curse.”

She was beginning to find the Polish drinking excuse tiresome. But he was so sweet, finding her robe for her and putting it on with many kisses along her arms and back and neck. The way he looked directly at her, smiling as he brushed back her loose curls, made her want to play. When he turned to get his shirt, she edged herself up on the bed and jumped on his back, laughing as he grabbed her calves and trotted her around the room. “Hey, don’t even think about dropping me!”

He did drop her. Right on the bed, where she lay on her back, legs askew, robe open, with the belt still tied, rather uselessly, around her waist, looking up at a man who so clearly desired her. “Come here,” she said. He climbed on top of her and pressed himself to her, and into her.

Later they had breakfast at a Café down the street and parted soon after. He told her that he didn’t know when he would be finished working that day. “I’m painting someone’s apartment,” he said. She had had no idea this was how he supported himself. There were so many things about his life she realized she didn’t know. She gathered her dance bag and walked to the studio through Rynek Główny. It was already crowded with tourists.

All that day she was alternately enticed by the thought of Marek, roller in hand, reaching upward, exposing the smooth white flesh of his side, and by the image of her grandfather in her dream. She took out her notebook and reread the sentence she’d written down. It seemed obscure and strange. Yet the phrase alone in the land of milk and honey so perfectly described her grandfather. It evoked all the loneliness she’d always known had resided in him, permanent as his chair by the window. She spent the morning trying to work it into the dance and became irritable when she couldn’t find a place for it. The more she tried to force it, the less it worked and the more aware she became that she was running out of time to keep reimagining the piece.

That afternoon, the company seemed fairly pleased when she announced they would be dancing to Górecki’s Third Symphony. She told them they would be carrying long dowels hung with traditional Polish religious banners. She asked for suggestions on how the banners and the costumes should look and how they could move with them.

“We could make them with white cloth and very tall, like we do at home,” Ewa suggested.

Ellen tried to feed this spark of interest. “Do you know any traditional Polish dances?” she asked Piotr. “Come on,” she urged. “Show me something.”

Reluctantly, Piotr unfolded his long, slight frame and shuffled to the middle of the studio floor. He splayed his fingers over his hips and took several defiant sidesteps to the right. With his left hand raised above his head, he began a series of turns, knees bent, his neck tipped back at a proud angle. Picking up speed, he circled the room and added a low, controlled kick, which reminded Ellen of the Russian Moiseyev dancers she’d seen as a child. The dancers began to clap out the beat.

Ellen joined them with enthusiasm. “We have to use this,” she said. Her notes for this section of the dance were pages long, crammed with unconnected ideas and tangential references. Now she saw how much better it would be to simply present a Polish dance, done in unison.

Piotr finished with a triumphant, short bow, and a small, self-satisfied smile.

By the end of rehearsal that day, Ellen had begun to feel more hopeful.

Andrzej remained behind in the studio. “Where is this from, what you are choreographing here?” he asked her.

Ellen wasn’t sure she really wanted to get into a whole discussion about it.

He pursed his lips, perhaps sensing her impatience. “I want to know how you make your choices for the dance. This is what I want to learn.” With unexpected hesitancy, he added, “If you will tell me.”

Ellen wasn’t sure if he was trying to understand choreography in general or her method in particular. “Don’t you ask Pronaszko questions like these?”

He clucked his tongue. “Kostek does not encourage me in choreography. He wants me more for himself.” He looked off long enough for Ellen to figure out that Kostek was a diminutive for Konstantin, Pronaszko’s first name. “It is more difficult for us in Kraków than in Warsaw, where I am from,” Andrzej said.

She understood that by difficult he meant being homosexual, but he shrugged off her question about how awkward his involvement with Pronaszko must be.

“He is not interested in training someone who might try to take his place someday,” he said.

She was surprised at how openly he expressed his bitterness. “Maybe you’ll have to go somewhere else to do choreography then.”

He did not respond.

“You could go back to Warsaw.”

“Yes, but I want to learn about modern dance, and Pronaszko is the best. This is not America. We do not have so many choices here for companies.”

“I have to tell you,” she said sympathetically, “you’re the last person in this company I ever thought I would get to like.”

His expression softened. “I know I am a pain in the ass. The company thinks so too. But with my English, I am a useful pain in the ass.”

Ellen raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You know, it wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t think you were such a useful pain in the ass either.”

He looked down, like a boy expecting a scolding.

She saw he didn’t realize she was joking and felt sorry for him. “Andrzej,” she said cautiously, “what do you think of my using this subject for the dance?”

“You should not pay attention to what they say,” he answered quickly. “They are thinking about the new Poland, yes, but they must know that the old Poland will always be with us too.” He shook his head. “Actually, you are lucky, because now it is the fashion to like Jewish things. People our age are becoming curious about them. They think of them more as part of the past. You are the first Jew some of the people in this company have met. They do not know what to say to you.”

Ellen was completely taken aback. “You mean I’m a novelty?”

He nodded. “You must understand, it is difficult for us to appreciate who are the Jews. In Warsaw, I grew up in an apartment that was built on a mound. My mother told me this was once the Ghetto. When the war was over, it was less expensive to build over the rubble and the remains of the Jews. So that is what they did.”

Ellen was appalled. “I have to tell you, this isn’t a normal way to behave toward people who used to live among you.”

He nodded. “You are right, of course. What can I say? But that is the way it was. All of Warsaw was a ruin. Rubble everywhere. They had too much to rebuild. It is different with us now, truly. In Warsaw, we have a Yiddish Theater, and almost everyone acting in this theater is Polish. People ask, Who comes here? Who understands this language anymore? But it is not just tourists in the audience, or even the old Jews who know this language. Polish people come. They want to hear these plays and this language. It is part of our history, you see? You cannot separate it.”

“But where do you go with that? There are no more Jews here.”

He shook his finger at her. “That is not true. I meet Jews here today. When I was a child I had a half-Jewish friend. His parents were very unusual because they raised him Jewish. His mother is the Jew, and he said that makes him Jewish. But he was unhappy because it is very difficult not to be Catholic in our country. He is very beautiful, and the girls always liked him, except there were no Jewish girls. His parents were going to move to Israel so he could marry. But then he met people at a place in Grzybowski Square, most of them half-Jewish also, or with a grandparent who is Jewish. They have a rabbi who comes and talks to them and helps them. So it is better for him now, and I think he is much happier. He has a girlfriend, a half Jew, but the right half, he says.” Andrzej shrugged, with a kind of resigned sadness.

Ellen put her hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for telling me all this. You know, you could choreograph a hell of a dance about you and your friend,” she said.

He smiled at her, in his old flirtatious way. “Then I think today you should accept my offer to have coffee.”

“I accept,” she said, and they went down the stairs of the old building together.