A Day of Small Beginnings (15 page)

Well, that’s that, Nathan thought. It’s not Thursday.

A Pole wearing a blue cloth jacket and workman’s overalls rounded the corner of the building. After he’d gone, Nathan noticed
that one of the front doors of the synagogue was slightly ajar. He climbed the steps and entered the foyer, telling himself
he was only interested in the building’s historical significance.

In the large, high-walled sanctuary, graceful brass chandeliers shone in the white light that poured through the windows.
Nathan was taken aback by the room’s elegant simplicity, by the beauty of the iron grille work and the delicate intricacy
of the canopy over the
Aron Kodesh,
where the Torah was kept. For him, a synagogue was a graceless place, festooned with plaques naming big, immodest donors
and lit with garish, multicolored lights. This is refined, he thought. Beautiful. He felt a bit mischievous. He’d have loved
to tell Pop he’d been to synagogue in Poland.
That
would have sent him spinning!

A small group of men stood praying around the bimah in front of the
Aron Kodesh,
terms he remembered from his Bar Mitzvah. They glanced repeatedly at him. Ignoring them lest they try to include him, he
brushed his hand across the leaf pattern of a bas relief along one wall and felt a sudden, small flutter of delight, like
the feel of Marion’s bare shoulder as he caressed it.

One of the men, his head covered by his prayer shawl, turned around. Nathan had no choice but to return his gaze. The man’s
egg-shaped face and his worker’s hands startled and touched him because he could have been Pop’s brother. He beckoned to Nathan,
as if to invite him under the protective wing of his prayer shawl. Something in the man’s expression put Nathan at ease. He’s
haimish,
he thought, surprised that the Yiddish word came to him instead of the English word
warm
or
cozy.
The man’s face was as warm as the pastrami-on-rye sandwiches he secretly indulged in whenever he was in New York.

“We need a
minyan,
” Pop’s look alike said in Yiddish.

Nathan froze. How could he, a nonbeliever, join in prayers he’d never learned? Out of a desire to spare the man offense, he
smiled, pretended not to understand, and hurried toward the door.

Outside, he immediately regretted that he had not spoken to the man, had not taken that small step that might have led him
into an interesting and informative exchange. If pressed, Nathan also might have admitted that he wouldn’t have minded some
Jewish company that day.

He walked around the other side of the building. Spray-painted on the white wall, next to a large, sloppy red Star of David
were the words “Fuck the Jews.” That these three words were written in English made Nathan feel as if the defacer had taken
a knife to
his
skin. His throat constricted. He could barely breathe. The fury painted on that wall was as incomprehensible as the Hassid
dolls, or the Irish boys yelling “dirty Yid, dirty Yid” through the streets of his childhood.

Shah, shah,
a female voice whispered in his ear.
A kluger vaist vos er zogt, a nar zogt vos er vaist.
Nathan ran his fingers over the keloid at the back of his head. The words comforted him so much he translated them under
his breath. “A wise man knows what he says, a fool says what he knows.”

13

T
HAT NIGHT
N
ATHAN HAD A DREAM
.

In Harvard Square, the Hassid doll with the gold coins balanced on his scales danced and screamed on the roof of the Coop,
limbs flying akimbo like in one of Ellen’s modern dances. The sound of a reckless, screeching violin reverberated over the
square, where a crowd of Nathan’s colleagues, students, neighbors, and acquaintances had assembled. The whole lot craned distortedly
to make out the Hassid’s words. Hawkers stopped hustling. Street musicians stood, mouths agape, silenced by the mad figure
swaying precariously above. “Give me! Give me blintzes, Jew!” the Hassid roared, his voice finally distinct.

On the other side of the square, from the great arched window of a synagogue, Pop sat watching with hooded eyes. Still and
remote, his slumped torso barely rose above the windowsill. Below him, the blue neon light of a bookshop pulsed indifferently.
Remainders, it said.

Nathan crouched under the subway awning in the center of the square wearing nothing but thermal underwear, the crotch puckered
from misbuttoning. Everyone was looking at him. Slowly, they raised their fingers and pointed. “He’s the Jew!” they whispered
to one another. Nathan cupped his genitals protectively and looked around, anguished.

The Hassid careened toward the ledge of the Coop and held out his scales, the fringes of his blue-and-white prayer shawl wafting
into clouds of smoke. He had Załuski’s mocking face.

Nathan cried out, “I have nothing to feed you! There’s nothing left.” He turned to Pop for reinforcement. But his father shrugged
and looked away. The Hassid howled again for blintzes. Nathan screamed with terror as the frenzied crowd closed in on him.

Suddenly, an oddly dressed old woman with a strong, beautiful face floated down like a dandelion seed. “Little Zokof, little
town. How I miss you so,” she sang, midair, to Pop in his window. He ignored her. She turned her attention to Nathan. She
was coming closer when he woke up.

T
he next morning, a young man of about thirty, medium build, in a black leather jacket, approached Nathan as he sat over his
fourth cup of coffee in the hotel café.

“Good morning, Professor Linden,” he said pleasantly, with the bare hint of a bow. “I hope I am not too early for you. I am
Tadeusz Staszyc, your driver. The car is in front, if you are ready.” The young man stuck out his hand.

Nathan shook it. “Thank you for agreeing to drive me on such short notice,” he said, thinking the boy’s dark-blond shag could
have used a wash. He followed Tadeusz across the sumptuous quietude of the marble lobby, through the revolving doors that
pushed them unceremoniously into the gray haze, noise, and smell of Warsaw.

Nathan regarded Tadeusz’s toy-size Peugeot and wondered whether he should sit in back like a taxi or in front.

“Please,” said Tadeusz, motioning to the backseat. “You’ll be more comfortable there.” This pleased Nathan. In the backseat
he could sink freely into his thoughts without feeling the need to keep up his end of a conversation.

Once seated behind the wheel, Tadeusz draped his arm casually over the front seat. A thick black digital watch hung from his
hairless, pale wrist. “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

Until that moment, Nathan had planned to visit Kraków. But without even quite knowing why, he said, “I’m doing some research
on your small towns. I was told Zokof would be a good choice. Do you know it?”

“Sure, it’s between Radom and Lublin. About an hour-and-a-half drive. How long are you in Poland?”

“I’ll be leaving tomorrow night,” Nathan said, as distracted as he was amazed that the young man could drive him to Pop’s
hometown, the way some people are amazed that a jet can take them to the “Holy Land.”

Tadeusz started the motor. “Two days in Poland and you want to be in Zokof?” He shrugged and edged the car into the traffic.
“I could take you to Lublin, or better, Kraków. Beautiful medieval city, Kraków.”

Nathan blinked rapidly, jittery from too much coffee and sorry for it. “I’m sure I’d like to see them both sometime,” he said.
They soon crossed a bridge over the Vistula to the Praga District, as Tadeusz informed him. He had to fight the dread that
overwhelmed him when he saw the cement buildings, the primitive dirt footpaths, and the uncut grass. They hadn’t even left
Warsaw. What was he going to find in Zokof, some backwater mired in poverty and superstition? The place wasn’t even listed
in his guidebook.

Just outside the city, Tadeusz slowed to avoid a farmer in a horse-drawn wooden wagon. But for the rubber tires, Nathan thought,
the wagons probably looked much the same in Pop’s day. He again wondered anxiously about Zokof. As long as he could remember,
the town had stood between him and Pop in a way that seemed different from other immigrant fathers and their sons. Other fathers
placed proud hands on their American sons’ shoulders and enchanted them with stories of hometowns whose names stuck in the
throat. These men didn’t become enraged at the mention of Poland, as Pop did.

It wasn’t that Pop was cold or unloving. But Nathan always knew that some part of him was so distracted he couldn’t seem to
pay sufficient attention to America. And that distraction was felt most deeply by Nathan, his American son. It made him feel
helpless and invisible. As a boy, he’d tried to get Pop’s attention by working to make the highest grades in his class. He’d
even made president of the debate club, shy as he was. But his successes never made much of an impression. Long after Nathan
had become an internationally acclaimed professor of constitutional law at Harvard, Pop still referred to him as “mine son
the meshuggener law teacher.” When Nathan received a MacArthur Grant he’d said, “
Feh!
We had plenty of hair-splitters like you in Zokof. Teachers and rabbis, a
choleria
on them all! Not one knows from how to earn an honest day’s living.”

Nathan had gulped with humiliation and fury. He hadn’t even bothered to tell his father that the grant came with a significant
monetary award. “How can you compare me to a rabbi?” he’d snapped, blaming Zokof for his father’s peculiar craziness.

But other times, Pop’s passion about his hometown invited Nathan to come a little closer. In those magical, suspended encounters,
the boy’s questions and the father’s answers felt like a tentative embrace.

“What was it like there in Poland?” the boy, Nathan, would begin.

“Slavery. It was slavery.”

“Tell me about your town, Pop.”

“What’s to tell? It was a town. A few people, some buildings, the dogs the Polacks set on us. It was a town from nothing.
A town you should never have to see. That’s all I know.”

“Did you have enough to eat there?”

“Eat? Bread and onions we ate. Soup.”

“Chicken soup, like Mom makes?”

“
Agh!
What are you talking? If a poor man ate chicken in Zokof, one of them must have been sick.”

“How was it when you came to America?”

“It was slavery.”

“But better than Poland, right? In America, you had freedom.”

“In America, Rockefeller has freedom. A worker like me has slavery. Capitalism is capitalism the whole world around,” Pop
would instruct with a twisted smile and a gentle, almost rabbinical wave of his hand that seemed intended, to young Nathan,
as a gesture of fatherly love.

T
hey were heading southeast on a two-lane highway out of Warsaw. “Are you from the Big Apple?” Tadeusz asked, lighting the
first of a chain of cigarettes in a hand-cupping, one-eye-squinting, Marlboro Man style.

“I’m from Cambridge, Massachusetts,” Nathan said, sniffing, irked by Tadeusz’s slang because it reminded him that he could
not converse without embarrassment in a foreign language. He smoothed his hair and caught sight of Tadeusz studying him in
the rearview mirror. “What part of the country are you from?” Nathan said mildly.