A Day of Small Beginnings (18 page)

After about a quarter of a mile, they turned left onto a dirt road. On their right, a rye field swayed, open and buoyant with
sun. On their left, more birch and pines. “Stop here,” Rafael said in English.

I had been afraid to come here, to see nothing changed, the stones crisscrossed in a dome over our House of the Living, our
cemetery. As I feared, as I knew, God had not forgiven me. Nathan’s return had not moved a single stone.

N
athan fairly leaped from the car, only to feel embarrassed by his obvious haste to escape Tadeusz’s domain. He reached for
the keloid scar at the back of his head and thought he heard the sound of horse hooves. Startled, he spun around. A peasant,
seated on a horse-drawn wagon, squinted down at him from under the brim of his gray cap. Nathan stared back. Involuntarily,
his hands balled up, as he found himself unable to break free of the man’s insolent stare. The peasant raised his reins. Nathan
threw his arms up protectively.

“Geyyah!”
the peasant yelled hoarsely. The horse jolted forward, and the wagon’s wheels grumbled with the sound of earth and rocks
being crushed beneath them. The peasant never took his eyes off Nathan, who slowly lowered his arms with all the dignity he
could muster.

To Nathan’s chagrin, Rafael appeared to be smirking. “He thinks you are here to make a claim on his property,” he said. “His
daughter lives in Yaacov Hertzberg’s house in town. He is afraid a rich American Hertzberg will come back and make trouble.
Come.” He shuffled around Tadeusz’s car, grasped Nathan’s arm, and led him slowly across the road to a narrow forest opening
strewn with broken bottles. Nathan stepped carefully over the debris and was surprised to see a long, weed-choked path of
large stone pavers stretching deep into the woods. He glanced around in confusion and wondered if this was the cemetery itself
or the way to the cemetery. He looked back at the car. Tadeusz sat rigidly in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, as
if contemplating his next move. “Wait for us here,” he called to Tadeusz. But he wondered if he would.

Uneasily, he followed Rafael down the path. A loud caw, followed by three or four others, echoed from above. He looked up
at the great canopy of the tall, thin-limbed trees. Scores of twiggy, round crows’ nests hung like huge dust motes from the
uppermost branches. The cawing intensified, harsh, coarse, and guttural. The birds swooped from tree to tree, their two foot
wingspans setting up waves of clattery motion in the branches.

A single lamppost rose from the green underbrush, a solitary indicator that nature had once been dominated here by the will
of man. The path led to a paved circle from which other stone paths unevenly radiated, like the bent spokes of an abandoned
wheel. Two scrawny dogs, heads and tails hanging, loped by and disappeared into the foliage.

Rafael stopped at the central circle and observed Nathan carefully. “This is the Jewish cemetery of Zokof,” he said.

“Where are the gravestones?”

“There are no gravestones. What the Nazis didn’t destroy, the Communists took to build roads and walls.
Farshtaist?
Understand?”

Nathan was too shocked to reply.

“What? This surprises you, Leiber? Where have you been?”

“I had no idea it would look like this,” Nathan said. He thought of Mount Zion Cemetery, where his father was buried, a city
of the dead that stretched for miles over prime Queens real estate, overlooking smokestacks and billboards with ads for Coppertone
sunscreen and Dominic’s Auto Service. He hated Mount Zion, with its specific Jewish reference, its long rows of stones sticking
out like so many taunting tongues.

But here, the very absence of Jewish gravestones made him realize the pettiness of his dislike for Pop’s resting place.
“Tah! Tah!”
the crows screamed back and forth above, denying even silence to the dead.

Rafael pointed his two twisted forefingers to the earth. “What they did here doesn’t change
bubkes.
This ground is sacred for eternity. Bodies of pious people are resting here! Men over there.” He pointed to the left. “Women
over here.”

He fixed his gaze on a small pile of stones about thirty feet away. “Some of them rest, eh, mine Freidl?” he muttered.

Nathan held his tongue, presuming Freidl was Rafael’s deceased wife.

Rafael cleared his throat and turned abruptly back to Nathan. “The Poles say magicians are buried under the gravestones that
used to be here. They say the stones were covered with ‘strange codes.’ That’s what they call the Hebrew letters.” He shook
his head disdainfully. “It’s been less than fifty years, Leiber. The stones are gone, but these meshuggeners have turned us
into their own fairy tale.”

“They
actually
believe in magic?” Nathan said.

“Ach!” Rafael responded with yet another dismissive wave of his hand. “They
actually
believed we put poison in their church bread, the bread they call the Host. I ask you, do
we
care what they eat in church? They make up these stories, Leiber, so they won’t be haunted by us, or by truth.”

“Which truth would that be?” Nathan asked, indulging in his old professorial trick of denying the objectivity of truth.

Rafael held up his hands in fists. “The truth that we used to be their neighbors.” His thumb shot out, signifying he counted
this as the number one truth. “They called us by name.” He raised his forefinger. “They knew our children.” Another finger.
“They bought our goods. They sold us food from their fields. They shared with us our daily life in this town. And then...out
like a light, Leiber. Out like a light. They let the darkness take us all. On purpose they forgot our names. That’s the truth.”
The fingers of Rafael’s hands splayed out before him, pointing their indictment to the heavens.

For several minutes the two of them stood together, silenced by a renewed round of screeching from above. The agitation of
the crows was palpable now. The black birds hung from the branches, waiting.

Rafael lowered his hands and walked slowly to the pile of stones.

Nathan followed, nonplussed. He wondered how many of his ancestors were buried here. He couldn’t name even one, having long
ago given up trying to get any information out of his father. Over the years, Pop’s refusal to discuss his life in Poland
had simply worn Nathan down. Even as a kid, he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere if he asked about his relatives. Perhaps this
was why he regarded genealogy as a hobby for people who had no serious interest in history, who reduced it to the merely personal.
Genealogy was for nostalgic aristocrats like Załuski, he thought, people who hoped to bootstrap greatness to themselves through
the imagined noble exploits of their forefathers.

Still, he couldn’t help wondering, what were their names, those other Leibers who came before him and Pop? He turned to Rafael,
thinking he might enlist his assistance to research the Leibers’ history in Zokof. Perhaps there was something in the city
records. The thought gave him the distance he needed from the oddness of his present situation. He toed the earth with the
tip of his shoe and tried to calm himself, retreating from the disturbing well of anger at Pop that so often churned his gut.
His father had had a secret, that much he knew. There was too much rage. Why didn’t he even have a picture of his parents,
like the one Marion’s mother had of her parents, somber as can be, sitting in their silver frame on the mantel with their
shoes sticking out from their stiff clothes, scuffed and black?

“You want to know about my father?” Pop would glare at him whenever the boy Nathan asked. “My father was a no-goodnik you
shouldn’t know from. What’s to know from a man who doesn’t make an honest living for his family? A man who wastes his time
in shul instead of putting bread on the table. Such a man, who left his family and never came back, you don’t have to know.
May his name be blotted out.”

They’d reached the little pile of stones marking the grave of the woman Rafael had called Freidl. By then, Nathan was trying
to reconcile Pop’s rejection of his father’s religiousness with the performance he gave every Passover. “You want I should
come to your Seder? What for?” Pop would demand, his English sputtering out like a candle, making way for the fiery Yiddish
that took its place. “A Seder is for the lazy no-goodniks who want to tell fairy tales.”

“But, Pop, you’re the only one who can read the Hebrew,” Nathan’s sister, Gertie, would plead.

“From my childhood I know Hebrew from that stinking
melamed
that drove it into me from when I was three years old. But from my head, as a thinking person, I know something else.”

Every year Pop would refuse to participate in the telling of the story of exodus from slavery in Egypt, the
Haggadah.
But the grandchildren, Ellen and Gertie’s Laura and Josh, would clamor for him to read the Hebrew. They had a fascination,
somehow, for the sound of the language. Maybe they were hungry for the religious education their parents hadn’t given them.
Every year, on the pretext that he couldn’t refuse his grandchildren, Pop complied.

Like a shaman, he would begin the incantation he knew by heart. After about three or four minutes, he would lay the book back
on the table and begin to cry. The family would sit transfixed, watching the tears flow down the lines of his cheeks until
they dropped off his jowls into his lap. When he finished his recitation, he would pull his large white handkerchief from
his trouser pocket and wipe his lashless eyes dry. Then he would look at his family in silence, as if he were a foreign child
among strangers.

Everyone but Nathan came to regard Pop’s tears as part of the service, as eagerly anticipated by the children as Elijah’s
visit for his cup of wine. For Nathan, tears that came from a childhood his father wouldn’t discuss with him felt like rejection.
So he interrupted these moments by clearing his throat and calling on the next person to read.

“Maybe he’s just sad about not believing in God anymore,” Ellen had suggested one year as the two of them turned out the lights
at the end of the evening.

“He wouldn’t cry about that,” Nathan had muttered.

But now he was not so sure. He recalled Załuski’s words of two nights before.
How do you know who you are if you don’t know where your family came from?
At the time, the question had seemed tinny and clichéd. But since he had come to Zokof, propelled by mere casual curiosity,
he felt the vastness of a loneliness he could not name, the disconnection his father’s rejection of his God had somehow caused
for him. He wondered if a connection was even possible anymore. What did he know of the things that drove the lives of his
family generations before? He didn’t know enough about their God to cry for his loss as Pop had. He didn’t know about God
at all. He’d been a seed tossed on a foreign shore, left to grow wild by his own father. “Damn him,” he said, under his breath.

And yet Nathan felt a sweet tug in his heart at the thought that people who lay buried here, halfway around the world from
the place he called home, surely shared the same genetic propensity for long, tapered toes and narrow-bridged noses that he
had inherited from Pop and had passed on to Ellen. He took a deep breath of the forest’s penetrating smell.

What
are
their names, Pop? he thought. Did you think I’d become religious if you told me their names? Were you that uncertain a socialist
that you had to make your family disappear?

A group of older Poles ambled down the path toward them, murmuring softly, nodding to one another as kindred souls do. They
skirted Nathan and Rafael carefully, averting their eyes when Rafael said, in Polish, “It is written in the Talmud that a
cemetery should not be used as a shortcut.” When he repeated this in English, Nathan was horrified, but also impressed at
the risks the old man took in provoking his neighbors.

He looked down at his plaid shirt, blue tie, and Timberland shoes. Anywhere but in Poland these clothes and his mundane face
simply identified him as an American. Just an American, not “the Jew” he felt he’d become here, a tag that had affixed itself
to him. The more he tried to pull away from it, the more it stuck, making him feel like a specimen, a bug on a board.

He took in an uneven breath and wished he were home, safe among the harmless squalls of academia. But when he remembered his
dream of Załuski in Harvard Square, dressed up as the Hassid doll, pointing at him, trapping him with that accusatory scale
of gold, he knew Cambridge would never again be an entirely safe haven.

Rafael raised his head. “It’s time to say
El Molei Rachamim
for her. She must rest.” He swept his arm in an arc around the cemetery, a gesture Nathan took to mean that the prayer was
for every Jew buried there. Rest? The dead are dead, he thought. He felt a hot wave of embarrassment break over his face at
the idea of taking part in a primitive religious ritual. He didn’t know any prayers, and he’d be damned if he was going to
make an ass of himself in front of passersby just to satisfy an old Jew. There, he’d said it,
that
word, even if only in the privacy of his head. Not the genteel
Jewish,
but
Jew.
Immediately, he felt deeply ashamed.

“I thought the prayer for the dead is called
Kaddish,
” he said, hoping to steer the discussion on to a more rational plane.

Rafael stared, as if unsure Nathan could be this ignorant. “Kaddish? A Jew doesn’t say Kaddish without a
minyan,
ten men.” Something about Nathan’s blank expression must have convinced Rafael he didn’t understand the distinction, because
his tone softened as he explained, “
Kaddish
means
holy.
It is an ancient prayer, Aramaic, a prayer in praise of God.”

“Then why is it said at funerals?” Nathan asked, remembering how Lou Gersh had stepped forward and said it for Pop.

“Because at the funeral a man might think to blame God, reject God for the loss. But at such times he needs to remember what
God has given us and to praise Him, out loud, with others. Kaddish a son says for his father, every day for eleven months
after his death. Saying Kaddish for the father shows a man has done his work well, raised a son worthy of his name.”