A Day of Small Beginnings (14 page)

“Well, it certainly is beautiful on the outside.”

The young man straightened proudly. “Before the war, all Warsaw was beautiful. It was the most beautiful city in Europe. Not
like this.” He motioned vaguely at the city beyond the reconstructed zones of Nowy
wiat and Old Town. “Horrible, no?”

Nathan knew better than to agree. It was one thing for a Pole to disparage his city, quite another for a foreigner to do so.
“It’s no wonder you love your beautiful churches then,” he said amicably.

The waiter seemed surprised. “But of course, we always love our Mother Church. Every Pole does.”

He went about his duties as if nothing could possibly be added to this observation. When he returned with the doughnut and
the glass of tea, Nathan was still debating with himself whether the young man had meant that a Jew could not be a Pole. Perhaps
he should have devoted more attention in his speech to the issue of separation of church and state, made a reference to the
case he’d just won against the evangelical Christians who’d proselytized at a public high school.

He took a bite of the doughnut, which was soft and delicious, and remembered how Ellen had teased him about that win.

“You really are the son of a flaming socialist,” she’d said.

This had peeved him. “There is a difference between the law and Pop’s ideology,” he’d said primly. That she had laughed at
this had hurt his feelings.

A young couple approached the table adjacent to Nathan’s and smiled shyly at him as they sat down. He smiled back, and resolved
not to allow Jewish paranoia to mar any more of his first impressions of the country. It was ludicrous to imagine the Poles
had nothing better on their minds than Jews and Jew-baiting. Aside from the usual quotient of kooks, why would they put energy
into disliking a people who were no longer part of their daily world? Annoyed with himself for having to articulate the self-evident, he decided the Jewish issue had been blown out of all proportion by his encounters with Załuski. The man had an agenda,
that’s all, he decided.

The waiter returned. “You find Frédéric Chopin’s...” He pointed to his chest.

Nathan grinned from a sense of vindication at the young man’s friendliness. He took a last sip of his tea. “Chopin’s heart?”
he guessed.

“Yes. In the church. Look on the left side, in the, how do you say?” He made a gesture with his hands as if circling something
long.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“If you go, you will see,” the waiter assured him. Nathan thought it somewhat strange that the church would keep only Chopin’s
heart, but he said, “Chopin is one of my favorite composers.”

The waiter nodded approvingly, as if he’d had some part in Chopin’s genius. Nathan paid his bill and, with a short wave good-bye, left the café.

At Holy Cross Church, he lingered outside, admiring the Baroque design. When he sauntered through the open front doors, it
was with the confidence of having visited hundreds of churches in his life. Inside, he was moved by the statue of Jesus, which
had been painstakingly arranged to produce a martyred but majestic effect. He remembered Załuski’s reference to Poland as
the Christ of Nations and felt sympathetic. What a horror it must have been for the Poles during the Nazi invasion, he thought,
knowing their Russian allies were sitting just outside, on the banks of the Vistula, mocking them, allowing the city to burn.

Chopin’s heart, it turned out, was contained in an urn that had been placed in one of the Church’s pillars. Nathan stood before
it reverently, grateful to Chopin for études that recalled for him tender evenings spent reading and drinking tea before the
fireplace with Marion, shuttling between recordings of Rubenstein and Horowitz.

A German tour guide approached the pillar and delivered a prepared speech to his elderly charges. Nathan wondered how these
Germans thought about the ruin still evident in the Church and surmised they might prefer to focus instead on the long-dead
Chopin. He did not meet their gazes, offended somehow by their unrepentant air.

Suddenly his ears filled again, muffling the ambient sounds of the church. From somewhere inside his head a woman’s voice
said, “Gottenu,” one of his father’s favorite expressions. He turned around to see who was speaking and was struck by dizziness
and an inexplicable unease at being in a church. Disturbed, he hurried out to the street, where, to his relief, his ears cleared
immediately. The sky, too, had cleared. He decided to continue his tour.

Heading south down Nowy
wiat, then west toward the monstrous Soviet-built Palace of Culture and Science, he came upon a swarm
of portable stalls displaying cassette tapes, videos, watches, and hand-painted signs offering foreign currency exchanges.
He was drawn to an unmanned stall of Polish folk music recordings and decided to wait for the proprietor to return so he could
buy one for Marion. Next to a box of tapes, he noticed a set of hideously ugly wooden dolls, presumably for sale.

Picking one up, he realized to his horror that they were all caricatures of Hassidic Jews, complete with bulging eyes, beaked
noses, and expressions of lusty greed. One figure held a fiddle, another a prayer book, but the one that shocked him most
held a scale piled high with gold in front of his big belly, and an unmistakable leer on his face.

Shaken, Nathan looked around, hoping for a benign explanation for why the dolls were on display, or why anyone would want
to buy one. But when no answer immediately presented itself, he threw the Polish folk tape back on the table and took off
at a brisk pace into the park that surrounded the Palace of Culture and Science.

When at last he felt composed enough to take his eyes from the pavement, he noticed a young woman in a pink cardigan about
fifty paces ahead of him. She held a sleeping little girl of about four or five in her arms. Sunlight flickered through the
light veil of trees. For a split second it lit up the child’s ringlets and reminded him of Ellen at that age. His heart began
to beat wildly again at the thought of what sort of people they would have become if his self-assured daughter had grown up
in Poland, exposed to such filth as he’d just seen, where he would have been unable to protect her.

The young mother in the pink cardigan changed paths and headed toward the other side of the Palace. Nathan turned away from
the building and resumed his walk westward until he reached Emilii Plater Street. He followed it north to a small street called
Twarda, which led to an almost empty, nondescript little square marked Plac Grzybowski. Set off at an angle from the street,
a graceful neo-Romanesque white stone building, with tall arched windows of leaded glass, caught his eye. Above its doors,
engraved in Hebrew, were the Ten Commandments, crowned by a Star of David.

He hesitated, unsure whether to investigate further. Anyone could visit a church, he reasoned. But to enter a synagogue was
tantamount to a confession of faith. In a country where a Jew looks to the locals like one of those dolls he had just seen,
who would visit a synagogue but a Jew? And even then, he’d have to be religious, which quickly brought Nathan to the question
of who would be inside. He felt no identity with the ranks of men who wrapped themselves in blue-and-white prayer shawls,
who rocked back and forth, muttering incomprehensibly. He scraped the pavement nervously with the side of his Timberland shoes,
as if something distasteful were stuck there.

“The synagogue is a place where weak men run to hide,” Pop had always said. “They run to the synagogue to pray instead of
fighting for a new social system, for a workers’ state.”

“What’s so great about socialism, Pop?” the thirteen-year-old Nathan had asked. “It seems to me that the system’s only as
good as the people who practice it. Just like religion.” He was never sure why he got such a rise out of Pop by teasing him
that socialism and religion were interchangeable. But it never failed.

“What do you know about it, Mr. Fancy American Boychik?” Pop would fight back. “You don’t know
bubkes
about it. You know books. You don’t know from work. I was a slave in that country. I was like a dog from the time I was eight,
living in a hole, working six days a week, sixteen hours a day.”

Every few minutes the Leibers’ one-bedroom apartment under the El would vibrate with the ruthless cacophony of passing trains.
From the kitchen, Nathan’s mother, Sadie, would bang her pots as a warning not to argue with his father, but he would press
on, carefully tracing the cracks in the living-room’s linoleum with his fingernails as he spoke.

Nathan’s conversations with his father invariably took place in the evenings, some time after Pop awoke at six o’clock and
before he went to work at eleven at Rubenstein’s Bakery around the corner. Back then, Pop worked six nights a week at Rubenstein’s.
He didn’t get home until seven in the morning. During the day, his mother guarded his sleep. Noise from Nathan or his sister,
Gertie, was not tolerated. “Your father breaks his back for you, and this is how you repay him? Take a piece of
mandelbrot
and go outside,” she’d say.

What little was left of his waking time, Pop spent barricaded behind his beloved newspaper, called
The Forward
in Yiddish, ensconced next to the window in the brown upholstered living room chair that had taken on the shape of his squat
back and wide seat. Nathan learned early that he could get his father’s attention only by sending verbal darts through that
newspaper. He always knew which article his father was reading because Pop talked to the paper as if it would answer him.
So Nathan would throw out an English response for every comment his father made in Yiddish. Like most immigrants’ kids, he
could understand Yiddish but couldn’t speak it. Eventually, in frustration, Pop would come out of his newspaper cave, growling
like a bear whose sleep had been disturbed by a flea.

Yet on
Yom Kippur
mornings, when Nathan and his father cooked up a batch of onions so the whole neighborhood would know that Sadie Leiber’s
husband and son were disgracing her and God again by not fasting, or on the evenings when Pop invited him to play gin rummy
around the kitchen table with Lou Gersh from down the hall, a penny a game, and on all those Saturdays when the family went
to Coney Island and Pop bought hot dogs with sauerkraut and tickets for the rides at Steeplechase, Nathan loved his father
deeply and hungrily. He especially loved the ferocity of Pop’s belief in socialism and his equally ferocious hatred of all
things Polish. They alone transformed the tired drone who sat like a sack of potatoes staring with his big, sad eyes out the
living room window. He became passionate, alive. And when Pop came alive, he’d reach out to his son to teach him what he cared
about. For Nathan, the magnetic ties between socialism, Poland, and Pop were an intricate puzzle he could never piece together
and which his father would never explain.

Nathan looked at the tree shadows rustling across the white stone walls of the synagogue. Suddenly, half a dozen voices echoed
the singsong of Jewish prayer off the high walls inside. He pulled out his tour book. “The No
yk Synagogue,” it said, “is
the only remaining synagogue of the Warsaw Ghetto and the only functioning synagogue in Warsaw. The Great Synagogue on Tlomackie
Street, which held up to three thousand people, was blown up by the Nazis. The No
yk was gutted for use as a horse stable
during the war and reopened in 1983 after a complete restoration. It is open to tourists from ten until three o’clock on Thursdays.”