A Day of Small Beginnings (16 page)

“My family is near Katowice.”

“What do they do there?”

“They’re farmers, since the time of King Zygmunt II. You know, the great Polish king?”

Nathan stroked his chin thoughtfully and nodded, although he hadn’t any idea of what King Zygmunt II’s claim to fame had been.
“What brought you to Warsaw?”

Tadeusz hissed a mouthful of smoke from between his teeth. “I wanted an education, to be a civil engineer. So my father let
me go.”

“He didn’t want you to be a farmer like him?”

Tadeusz turned and gave Nathan a smile. “No. He said, ‘Get educated.’ He used to read books he took from a man he worked for.
He didn’t want me to sneak around like that.”

Nathan gazed at a couple of black-and-white cows grazing in a field and thought it refreshing to hear of a farmer who hadn’t
been afraid to embrace his son’s intellect.

“My father says sneaking is for Gypsies and Jews.”

Nathan’s hand dropped stiffly onto the door handle as if it had been knocked from his chin.

“But I don’t know Jews,” Tadeusz continued matter-of-factly. “There aren’t many of them anymore. At least, not ones who call
themselves Jews.”

Nathan coughed nervously but couldn’t resist asking, “What else would they call themselves?”

“They hide, like they did in the war. We don’t know how many there really are. There could be thousands, maybe even millions.
Our parents say they recognize them. A lot of them are in the Party, the Communist Party, yes? But mostly they’re capitalists.
My father always said, the Poles own the land but the Jews own the houses. It’s a shame, really, but we never mixed well.”

Nathan stared at the back of Tadeusz’s head, stupefied, unsure how to, or even if he should, argue. The opinions being offered
as fact were like deadly viruses that would simply mutate if he revealed himself as a Jew. He thought briefly of Załuski and
said nothing.

“There’s a lot of strange stories the old people tell about Jews,” Tadeusz said, apparently oblivious to Nathan’s discomfort.
“My grandmother used to say they killed Christian children for their Easter bread.”

“Jews don’t kill Christian children,” Nathan said, hoping to at least convey annoyance.

Tadeusz turned around and offered him a friendly look. “I don’t say they do.
She
said it was in their religion. My grandmother said that when the Nazis came to our town, the Jews cried out, ‘Let Christ’s
blood fall on our heads and on our sons’ heads,’ and they accepted their punishment.”

Nathan tensed from his neck through his shoulders and down his back. He studied his reflection in the window, disgusted at
his gratitude that his looks had always allowed him to hide. He yearned to know the strength of a man who could say to Tadeusz,
“Here now, fellow. I am a Jew.”

They were on Highway 7, the road to Radom. Neither driver nor passenger spoke. The flat Polish landscape, with its thin-striped
fields of potatoes, cabbage, and corn plowed by horses and men in caps, rolled on mile after mile. In the early morning sun,
the soft willows and poplars, forsythia and white-blossomed apple trees that crowded along the unfenced boundaries blew in
unison. They passed a group of peasants gathered in the middle of a field. Nathan wondered, as he watched the village priest
bless the earth, if the Christians realized they were following an ancient pagan rite.

14

N
ATHAN
! W
E ARE HERE!
T
HESE FIELDS WHERE
I
CROSSED WITH
your father on our flight to Radom. Here, we saw Nahum and his horse. There, your father slept beneath the trees and I had
a vision of our town, of every man awakening to pray, generations I saw though not, God forgive me, the pogrom they had made
in the night. Nathan, look! This is your Zokof!

W
hen at last Tadeusz’s car passed the black-and-white road sign to Zokof, Nathan rolled down the window and craned his neck
for a fuller view of the town. The road was lined with willows and apple trees. A warm breeze, laden with the sweet smell
of spring grass, rushed into the car and tousled his hair like the fingers of a fond old aunt.

Zokof began with a small white shed and a blue-gray wooden house at the edge of a field. After that, the two-lane highway
narrowed to a main street of two- and three-story postwar houses, their casement windows hung with white curtain sheers. Each
story, being constructed of different building materials—stone, brick, cinder block, or stucco—gave the impression that these
houses had been built over a period of years.

They passed a man in a horse-drawn cart, a couple on foot, a young girl on a bicycle. From the shabbiness of their clothing,
Nathan guessed the town had not enjoyed much prosperity in the new capitalist era. Near the main square, the already decaying
postwar apartments rose to four stories, their balconies hung with plants and laundry. Tiny automobiles buzzed across the
main street from narrow side lanes, but the town did not have a traffic light or even a stop sign.

“Where do you want to park?” Tadeusz asked.

Nathan pointed at the town’s main square, with its war memorial in the center. “Over there.” Decorative black chains trimmed
each of the square’s corners, but it seemed uncared-for, no more than a large patch of land cut diagonally with footpaths
and dotted with small trees and trodden grass. From the far side of the square, the brick church’s spire, a stiletto point
atop an onion bulb, accented the town’s otherwise flat skyline. Nathan wondered what Pop would have recognized about this
place.

Tadeusz pulled the car onto the curb and turned off the motor. “Would you like me to come with you, to translate?”

Nathan got out of the car. “Perhaps a little later,” he said, tired of coping with the tension the young man provoked in him.
“Why don’t you get an early lunch and meet me back here in an hour.”

“Sure,” said Tadeusz, locking the car door with one hand, searching for the extra pack of cigarettes in his pocket with the
other.

Nathan crossed the street to get a closer look at the older buildings that lined the square, all of which had shops at street
level. He wondered how much of the town had survived from Pop’s era. At the corner, just before heading down a side street,
he glanced back at Tadeusz, leaning against the car fender, smoking with the offhanded assurance of a native son.

For a quarter of an hour he wandered, not knowing what he was looking for. The stares of passersby made him feel his strangeness
in their midst. Was it the stranger or the American they saw? he wondered. Or was it the Jew?

He walked on, scanning the street for clues about the past. A crow cawed from a nearby tree, then swooped crazily close to
him and flew down a curved lane. The lane, with its low-slung sheds and shacks, was the only one that didn’t conform to the
town’s gridlike streets.

Curious, he followed it until he came upon a small wooden house with a weathered, overhung roof. Moss crept unevenly up its
unpainted walls, as if nature were already reclaiming it. Above the windows, the remains of a fiery red-orange paint peeled
and furled.

A grass-scented breeze again blew against Nathan’s face, surprising him. As he stared at the old house, certain that it dated
from Pop’s time, the front door opened. From the shadows of the doorway, a small, thin, quite elderly man slowly stepped out
into the late-morning sun. His beard and long hair were the color of smoke, and the deep wrinkles around his enormous sagging
eyes framed his face like barbed wire.

Nathan saw the yarmulke and the long gabardine coat. His heart began to hammer. Part of him wanted to draw back, repelled
by such an extravagant show of religiosity.

Years ago, the mere sight of his niece, Laura, with a Star of David around her neck had had almost the same effect on him.
“Since when have you felt the need to wear your religion around your neck?” he’d admonished her at a family dinner. His sister,
Gertie, had given him a murderous look.

“I bought it because I’m proud of being Jewish,” Laura had said, with all the pomposity that adolescence is capable of mustering.

Pop had been there. He’d laughed, cackled actually. “You think the world won’t remind you you’re a Jew?”

“Yeah, sure,” Laura had said, seemingly impervious to the cut. But the next time he’d seen her, the Star of David was gone,
although whether it was because of Pop or because she’d found another cause to make her proud of herself, Nathan never knew.

He studied the figure in the doorway. What kind of madman would dress like this in Poland? He was within feet of him now,
about to pass by the house, when it occurred to him this might be the only remnant of Pop’s world he would find in Zokof.
It was a take-it-or-leave-it opportunity. But if he took it, how could they communicate? If the man spoke to him in Yiddish,
he wouldn’t be able to answer, even if he understood.

Then he remembered his regret at not having spoken with the men at the No
yk Synagogue in Warsaw, and in a moment of inspired
unselfconsciousness, he said the only word that came to him.
“Landsman.”

Because the word, with its connotations of tribal kinsmanship, was such an odd and difficult choice, Nathan pronounced it
as softly as a confession. He’d always used a soft voice to dull whatever traces remained of his Brooklyn Jewish accent. Still,
he felt out of character, alien to himself for having said it.

The old man regarded him carefully and nodded. Nathan nodded back, his equilibrium off again, as it had been in the lecture
hall and in the Holy Cross Church in Warsaw. The man remained rooted to his place in the doorway.

“
Bist a Yid?
Are you a Jew?” The voice had a gruff quality that suggested impatience.

Nathan cringed at that word,
Yid.
He could barely stand to answer in the affirmative, to call himself the equivalent of a spic, a nigger, a wop. But the man
seemed to require some kind of confirmation before he would go on.

“Yes,” he said tightly. “Do you speak English?”

“A
bissel,
yeh.”

Nathan was deeply relieved. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Where did you learn it? Here? I would think German, Russian, perhaps,
but not English.”

“I learned what I had to learn,” the old man said impatiently. “We have Voice of America, BBC. I read lots of books, yeh?
What else is for me to do? You from America?”

Nathan was glad for the opportunity to explain himself. “Yes, I am,” he said, with unaccustomed eagerness. “I’m a professor
of constitutional law at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Actually, I was invited here to lecture at Warsaw
University. They gave me a car and a driver so that I could see a little of the country.”

“The government sent you?”

“I’m working with your government to develop a constitution,” Nathan said, surprised that his account seemed to anger the
old man.

“Government,” he scoffed. “I have no government. What for did they send you here?”

“They didn’t send me.”

“Then why do you come to a town like this?”