A Day of Small Beginnings (23 page)

Nathan felt his confidence in Rafael slide out from under him like a chair. He’d been a dupe, a kid seduced by a magician’s
charm, by the excitement of secrets revealed.

“You know what’s magic?” Pop had once said when the boy Nathan had offered to perform a card trick for him. “
Gornish,
nothing. Nothing but the sleight of hand. A magician’s like a rabbi. He pretends to make something out of nothing. And from
the nothing he makes his living!”

Nathan tilted back his head. What the hell
did
Rafael want from him? He was no longer sure if he could trust anything the old man said, especially about Pop. For God’s
sake, he thought, I’ve spent the precious few hours I had in Pop’s hometown with a man who thinks he communicates with a dead
woman!

He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and tried not to think about Załuski’s cynical smile upon hearing Tadeusz tell him
that Professor Linden, who did not care about the origins of his name, had followed a crazy old Jew into a cemetery.

“Come, we’ll go back to town,” Rafael said, taking Nathan again by the arm. “We’ll go to my house. There’s more I have to
tell you.”

But Nathan had had enough.

Rafael turned to him. “Nu?” He raised his eyebrows. “We’ll go now.” Abruptly, he tugged Nathan in the direction of the car.
“She’ll be pleased.”

The forest reverberated with the batting of crows’ wings. Nathan glanced around at the rush of shadows. Somewhere in the distance,
several men shouted to one another. He shuddered. If Rafael’s story had even a glimmer of truth to it, Pop had heard something
like that the night he had come here. His sense of vulnerability increased with the loss of his faith in Rafael.

“Rafael, please understand,” he said as he felt himself being dragged like a child out of the cemetery, “I would like to visit
your house, but I am expected in Warsaw. At five o’clock I have a meeting scheduled with some colleagues at the university.
Perhaps another time.” It sounded so obvious to him that there would be no other time that he felt guilty. He told himself
he was only trying to spare the old man’s feelings.

Rafael’s eyes flashed with the angry suspicion that Nathan had seen earlier.

“Also, I’m expecting a call from my daughter in New York,” Nathan quickly added. “I would like her to meet you one day,” he
said, hoping to make amends. But having said this, he realized how much Ellen would love Rafael’s stories, especially the
ones about Freidl. He thought it a miracle that he’d produced a child who did not suffer from his infirmities, who jumped
through life feet first, bouncing back unharmed from her mistakes, as if tethered to some magical elastic cord.

Nathan sighed inwardly, utterly exhausted and depressed by his own rigidity.

By this evening, he told himself, everything would be fine. He would eat downstairs at one of the Marriott restaurants, swaddled
like a babe in the familiar folds of an American enterprise. The recollection of the hotel’s plush comfort filled him with
an almost giddy gladness. Poland, with all its unrepentant meanness, would be kept at bay outside the hotel’s revolving doors.

Rafael bowed his head and said, “Freidl needs you, Leiber.
Farshtaist?
Come tomorrow.”

“I’ll try,” Nathan said weakly, knowing he would not. What a life he must have had, he thought. Why doesn’t he leave Zokof?
What’s here for him?

They had begun their return to the cemetery’s entrance when Rafael stepped off the path and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“I think there are several Leibers buried here,” he said.

Curious, Nathan joined him. Standing there, he felt a pang as he remembered the day, just after he and Marion were married,
when they had opened the telephone book to the L’s and picked the name Linden. They weren’t hiring Jewish professors at the
University of Colorado that year. Nathan had decided that signing his name
Leiber
wasn’t important enough to ruin his career over. He remembered Pop’s anger on the telephone.

“A name is not like grass. You don’t pull it out by the roots and say that’s that. It’s a
shonda,
a shame on your head that the family name, a proud Jewish name, will die with me!”

“What’s the difference, Pop?” Nathan had argued. “Since when do you care so much about having a Jewish name?”

“What do you know what I care? I care plenty that I’m a Jew. I don’t need a passport to prove it to anyone. I have my name.
I know where I come from. Did I change my name when I came to this country?”

Nathan remembered feeling shocked by Pop’s outburst. Illogical, he had thought, for a socialist to harbor that kind of emotion
for a discarded faith.

Marion had sat in silence throughout the whole conversation. At no time during that telephone call or after did she admit
to Nathan’s mother or father that the name change had originally been her idea. From the day they got engaged, she had balked
at the idea of losing her ambiguous maiden name, Ross. “Leiber is just too difficult a name for people to spell,” she’d said.
“And think of our children, what they’ll have to go through if you give them a foreign-sounding name like that. Really, Nathan,
it’s not fair.”

He had succumbed to her reasoning without protest because he just couldn’t see the point of clinging to a Jewish identity
when it stood in the way of his marriage and his professional advancement. They had chosen the name together. Their married
name, they called it, until Linden slid off their tongues as if it had always been theirs.

Near the cemetery entrance, he caught sight of the nose of Tadeusz’s car, still parked by the side of the road. But his relief
that he had a ride back to Warsaw was tinged with renewed anxiety about his driver. He dreaded having to pull on his academic
mantle to keep Tadeusz in his place.

At the lone lamppost near the end of the path, Rafael suddenly reached down and pulled up a handful of grass. “It is customary,
when leaving a Jewish cemetery, for mourners to take a handful of grass and throw it in the direction of the grave.” He handed
some blades to Nathan. “We say, ‘May her soul sprout from this place as the grass sprouts from the earth.’ You must say this,
Leiber. Maybe if it comes from you, it will help her rest.”

Nathan glanced at the car. Assured that no one was watching, he accepted the grass from Rafael. “May she, uh, sprout from
the earth as the grass sprouts from this place.” He gave the grass an underhand toss in the direction of Freidl’s grave, calculating
that overhand might look disrespectfully athletic.

Rafael grunted his approval as, with a gentle swing of the wrist, he too tossed grass toward Freidl’s grave. He put his hand
on Nathan’s shoulder. “There is something else you should know, Leiber.
Grass
is the last word your father said in this cemetery.”

Nathan paled.

“Maybe he meant the grass God put in Jan’s wagon to make him slip and fall, but Freidl said he dropped two handfuls of it
on her grave.” He paused. “She said he was frightened by it, that he kicked the blades when they fell. But still, it helped
her. It reminded her of her favorite saying from the Talmud. You know of the Talmud, Leiber?” Rafael raised his eyebrows.

“I know of it, yes,” Nathan said. But his mind was still trying to process how Rafael would know what Pop had said to Freidl.
A fiction, he decided. It can’t be anything else.

“Listen to me now,” Rafael said with such vehemence Nathan was startled. “The Talmud says, ‘Every blade of grass has its own
guardian star in the firmament which strikes it and commands it to grow!’”

“Very interesting. What do you think that meant to her?” Nathan asked, employing his old technique of getting others to explain
themselves without having to admit that he hadn’t understood them.

“It means that every living thing has within it a holy spark. Once lit, that spark will guide it toward growth.” Rafael turned
back and surveyed the cemetery. “On the night Itzik left here, his soul was on fire. That I’m sure. If he kept that flame
alive in America, if he grew, well, you would know better than us. But one thing I will tell you: your father had a soul from
the earth. Freidl always said it was like an uncooked potato.”

Nathan looked up at the trees. If Freidl was a creation of Rafael’s loneliness, he thought, how did she, or he, know so much?
He saw Pop sitting in his Brooklyn window, all round and white, his large oval eyes trained on
The Forward.
He felt indignant. What had he expected to get from an uncooked potato? Respect? Appreciation for his accomplishments? To
his surprise, he laughed. “That’s him,” he said, shaking his head. “She got that right. He was an uncooked potato until the
day he died!”

“It’s a shame. She’ll be disappointed.”

Nathan didn’t feel like arguing. “I don’t mean to be rude,” he said, “but it’s hard for me to imagine being in the presence
of a dead woman’s soul.”

“What are you talking about, Leiber? You yourself were in her presence last night, in your dream! She sang a tune, ‘Little
Zokof, little town.’ Remember? Remember?”

Nathan blushed and admitted it was so, though for the life of him, he couldn’t remember having told Rafael about his dream.

“Your problem isn’t imagining, it’s admitting what you can’t explain. Easier to forget, yeh? All those moments when the past
and the present become one thing. Like a few minutes ago, you felt Itzik here with you, in this cemetery. I could see it on
your face. Don’t try to deny it. This is how God intervenes in our lives, Leiber. Pay attention. Stay awake!” He clapped his
hands in front of Nathan’s shocked face. “She followed him out of this cemetery, all the way to Warsaw and beyond, until he
left for America.” He cast a penetrating look at Nathan, then took his arm and resumed guiding him toward the cemetery entrance.
“I know what I’m saying,” he added confidently.

They stepped out into the hazy sunshine, where Nathan was taken aback at the sight of six or seven peasants, men in their
fifties, in tattered overalls, standing beside Tadeusz’s car. A white-haired old woman with a green-patterned scarf tied under
her chin was also there, her fingers curled tightly over her cane. She wore a long yellow sweater over her gray dress, even
in the heat of the day. The little group jostled one another as if waiting for a show to begin. At the other end of the car,
Tadeusz fired pebbles into the tall grass with one hand and cupped a lit cigarette with the other.

With Nathan and Rafael’s approach, the Poles fell silent. They stared, but their eyes were empty of expression. Nathan swallowed
hard and kept walking, his eyes on the latch of the rear door. He was halfway across the road when he realized Rafael was
not at his side. He turned back and watched in horror as the old man raised his arms above his head and, in a voice that could
be heard by all the congregants at the car, said to him, “The Jews have been in this country for over a thousand years. Once,
there were more than a thousand cemeteries like this in Poland. One for every year, yeh?” Rafael swung his arms out wide and
punched the air for emphasis.

Tadeusz stopped throwing pebbles. He turned to the Poles and translated what Rafael had said. The Poles did not stir. Neither
did Nathan. His focus skittered between them and Rafael, and he felt he had become the unwilling fulcrum in their game of
Polish seesaw.

“Right here, in our little town of Zokof, we have graves that date from the fifteenth century,” he said.

Tadeusz took a nervous drag on his cigarette. The old Polish woman shouted something in a hoarse, high-pitched voice and seemed
to be trying to enlist the others’ support. Nathan was revolted. She was toothless. Two of the men nodded in agreement. Nathan
would have liked to have asked what they were saying, but he was afraid of igniting the situation further.

“She’s saying the Jews are always crying about how they suffer,” Rafael said, with a curt nod in the peasants’ direction.
“They say we suffer because of what we did to Jesus.” Rafael raised his eyebrows again. “Imagine how Jesus, a Jew, son of
a Jewish mother, would suffer if he saw this house of eternity, this
beis oylom,
this cemetery of his people. He would ask, ‘Where is the wall that used to be here?’ He would ask, ‘Where is the house to
prepare the bodies for the grave?’ He would ask, ‘Where are the tombstones, the
matzevot?
’” Rafael narrowed his eyes. “Such beautiful things, those matzevot of the Jews. We had them carved with lions, eagles, trees,
books, with candles and creatures and words, words, words. On those matzevot we made the hands of the
Kohanim!
” He split his fingers into pairs of twos, demonstrating the pose of the priestly hands. “Wouldn’t Jesus ask ‘Why is there
not a single sign of respect for the dead? What kind of people are these who come here to drink and pick mushrooms?’” He glanced
at Nathan and said, as an aside, “It’s a Polish
bubbe-myseh
that the best mushrooms grow here.”

The Poles, having heard and understood everything, thanks to Tadeusz, shouted short responses. Then one of them smiled, revealing
a gold tooth. The others began to laugh and make jokes.

Rafael addressed himself to Nathan. “It’s up to you, Leiber. To them, I’m an old meshuggener. They don’t bother with me anymore.”

Nathan looked at Tadeusz, who now seemed perplexed. He looked at the Poles. What seemed frighteningly evident was that his
name, Leiber, had had a powerful effect on all of them. The grins had dropped from their faces. They stared at him. But what
could the Poles hold against the Leibers now? It was a generation later, after all.

Suddenly, he heard a whooshing sound and felt as if he was being lifted high above the scene. As he hovered there amorphously,
someone, a woman, began to hum a tune. Terrified, he looked down at Rafael for help.

“Leiber, remember what I have said,” Rafael responded. “For all our sakes, remember her.”

On the ground, Nathan saw his own body sway unsteadily.

The Polish woman thrust out her cane and beat her chest with her other hand. “Leiber!” she cried out.