A Day of Small Beginnings (24 page)

He fell, graceless as ever, back to the place where he’d stood at the edge of the forest, between the madness of a lone Jew
and the Poles who were his neighbors.

A gaggle of gray geese ran by, honking loudly as their owner herded them down the unpaved road.

Nathan took advantage of the short distraction and walked briskly to the car. “Rafael, we have to go now,” he said, trying
to camouflage his fear with a measured look—distinguished, weighty, but with a glint of appeasement. He clasped the rear door
latch, opened the door, and swung himself inside, deeply relieved that the Poles had inexplicably backed away and that Tadeusz
was moving toward the driver door. He willed himself to check Rafael’s progress toward the car, afraid that he might have
to intercede on his behalf.

Without a word, Tadeusz started the motor. Rafael got in and looked straight ahead, hands on his knees. Tadeusz turned the
car back in the direction of town, holding himself unnaturally straight in his seat, his arms rigidly angled on the wheel.
The car churned up the gravel on the road. Nathan threw his whole body around to look out the rear window, at the Poles who
stared back at him.

I felt his hesitation at saying El Molei Rachamim. I felt it when he threw the grass. A vigorous head doubts, my father always
said. But a man Nathan’s age should doubt with a certain wisdom that can tolerate the unknown. He was too full of fear. What
he could not explain he would not hold in his heart. What hope could I have that God would respond to such a short-lived kavonah
as he had? I was desperate that Rafael should have another chance with him, to teach him, to open the way. When they came
outside the cemetery, I sang the tune. I flew close to his ear and begged him to believe Rafael. What did I do but make him
more afraid?

19

T
HAT EVENING,
N
ATHAN LAY ON HIS BED IN DROWSY COMFORT
after a hot shower and the steak dinner he had permitted himself after such a difficult day. The jacket he had worn to Zokof
lay draped over the chair. A stray blade of grass hung limply from its outer pocket. Nathan looked at it sadly.

He was no longer sure what had happened earlier that day, how much of what he’d seen or heard was real, how much an exaggerated
perception of reality. Was Rafael an extraordinary man or just a man so different from himself that he’d seemed extraordinary?
As for Pop and Freidl, the less he tried to rationalize what he’d heard about them, the better. He turned out the light.

Sometime during the night, a woman’s voice hummed the tune he’d heard at the entrance to the Zokof cemetery, the same tune
he’d heard in his dream the night before. He opened his eyes.

A lantern flickered in the distance and grew, illuminating a life-size copy of Pesha Goldman’s photograph of the fourteen-year-old Itzik. Itzik’s pale, hungry face contrasted vividly with his borrowed studio clothes. He stared at Nathan, his big,
sad eyes unblinking.

“You didn’t retie Hindeleh’s ribbon,” the boy Pop said from the photograph. “You were supposed to retie it, like this.” He
held up his arm. The ribbon twisted around it like tefillin.

“How was I supposed to know about the ribbon?” Nathan said. “
You
never even told me you had a sister.”

The boy looked off. “She had hair for three people, my mother used to say.” His eyes sought Nathan’s. “Just like Ellen’s.”

A round wooden table and chairs materialized. Pop, Ellen, and a little girl with wild red hair sat playing cards.

“A penny a game,” said Hindeleh, laughing.

“Nine takes five,” Ellen said, happily slapping down her cards. She was about eight years old.

Lou Gersh, Pop’s old card partner from Brownsville, appeared from the shadows holding the lantern above his head. “A penny
a game!” He laughed with the girls. “Follow me,” he said to Nathan.

Nathan followed Lou until all that remained of the card players was the muffled sound of their far-off voices. The lantern
swung between them. Nathan reached for it, and Lou laughed. “
Yit-ga-dal v’yit-ka-dash.
Remember when I said Kaddish for your father?”

Nathan nodded, feeling safe as ever beside the Beanpole, as the kids used to call him. “Where are we going, Lou?”

“Back.”

“Back where?”

“To Zokof.”

Nathan stopped walking. The darkness engulfed him. He felt as if he were choking. “Why do I have to go back? What for?”

“Because it’s not finished, what your father left there. The graves are blocked, a maze of cut stones. The dead need peace,
Nathan. They deserve better.”

Nathan turned away from Lou. Sheaves of grass and mounds of stones welled up before him. Once again, he heard that sweet,
slow melody, gorgeous as a Chopin nocturne.

Out of the emptiness, an enormous female figure appeared, face covered, wrapped in a heavy, triangular plaid blanket. Her
posture was regal. When she lowered her arms, he saw the face of a wise-eyed da Vinci Madonna. She looked him up and down
and smiled, revealing the contours of her high cheekbones.

A gust of wind blew and turned her into an old woman, the same woman who’d sung to him in his dream the night before he’d
gone to Zokof. Now she wore a square white cloth on her head, tied in knots at its four corners.

“It’s a lovely gift,” she said.

Her accent was Yiddish, but the rich timbre of her voice was strangely pleasing to him.

She removed the handkerchief from her head and untied the knots. It floated in her hand, filled with light.

Nathan suddenly recognized it. “That’s my father’s!” He lunged forward and tried to snatch the handkerchief away.

The woman shuddered noticeably, but she recovered her composure. “I am Freidl,” she said. “I knew your father.”

He stared.

Her smile returned. “In town, the people called him Itzik the Faithless One. But your father had faith plenty, I can tell
you. So much it broke my gravestone in two.”

Nathan still could not speak.

Freidl began to sing her melody.

Lou was gone. His lantern shone faintly in the distance.

“What do you want?” Nathan said.

She held Pop’s glowing handkerchief high above her head and beckoned him to follow. When he didn’t, she faded away, leaving
Nathan alone in the night.

A
t seven the next morning, the telephone rang.

“Dad, I have fantastic news!” Ellen said.

Nathan rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“We did my new dance piece tonight at the Ninety-second Street Y. Mom came. It went really well. Greg Moore heard I have a
shot at getting that New York State grant I told you about. It could fund me for half a year. Isn’t that terrific?”

Nathan put on his glasses and sat up in bed. His daughter was now twenty-five. But when she told him about her work, her voice
still rushed and tumbled the way it had when she was five. “That’s wonderful news!” he said, with as much enthusiasm as he
could manage. Despite her fervor, he still wished she’d pursue a career more in line with her intellectual capabilities. Time
and again he’d asked her how long this playing at being a dance choreographer would go on. She was jeopardizing her future
stability, rejecting the help he could provide, to prove what? That she was her own person?

“It’s Ellen’s prerogative to make her own life,” Marion repeatedly warned him. “If you keep this up, you’re going to sour
your whole relationship with her.”

He knew she was right and tried to hold his tongue, hoping that Ellen would eventually decide to move on.

“How did Mom like the performance?” he asked.

“She said some of it reminded her of Bread and Puppet Theater pieces, but that it had my stamp on it. By the way, I asked
her to tuck Grandpa’s handkerchief into your suitcase. She didn’t understand why I wanted it to go to Poland with you. Did
she do it anyway?”

Nathan was stunned. “I have no idea. Just a minute.” He stumbled over to his open suitcase, trying to imagine how Pop’s handkerchief
had been transported from his dream to his waking life. Marion had indeed planted the handkerchief in the crimped pouch at
the back. The sound of Ellen’s childhood voice in his dream returned to him.
Nine takes five.

Flattening the crumpled ten-inch square on the bed, he recognized the raised lines on the fabric. He picked up the phone.
“It’s here,” he said shakily. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“I’m not sure. Remember how once I told you Grandpa cried at the Seder because he was thinking about his childhood? That’s
why I sent it. It’s the only thing I have of his, and since he never got the chance to go back, I thought the handkerchief
could go back for him.” She laughed. “Big symbolism, right?”

Nathan wondered if Ellen really believed Pop had never returned to Poland because he hadn’t had the chance. Could she be so
naive about the political and social realities of Jews in Eastern Europe? Of course she could. And whose fault was that? After
two generations in America, he’d made sure she was an insider. She had no idea what it was to be a Jew in a hostile country.

“Actually, I thought there was something poetic about sending part of Grandpa back to Poland,” Ellen said, “especially since
his handkerchiefs always reminded me that he was from Europe. I mean, Americans use Kleenex.”

Nathan remembered how his mother used to scrub the daylights out of Pop’s handkerchiefs before she ironed them into perfect
squares. “Elli,
everyone
used handkerchiefs in Grandpa’s day. Kleenex weren’t invented yet,” he said.

She giggled. “Remember that time you made Grandpa come with us to the Adirondacks? He tied knots in all four ends of his handkerchief
and put it on his head to protect his bald spot from the sun. He said that’s what they did in Europe.”

Nathan’s heart hammered as he remembered the knotted handkerchief in his dream.

“Dad?”

“I’m here.” He looked at the handkerchief, anxious yet amazed at the coincidence.

They spoke about other things after that. He carefully avoided mentioning his visit to Zokof. He didn’t want to excite her
until he’d been able to get some perspective on his experience there. He told her instead about the interesting church he’d
seen, where they kept Chopin’s heart in an urn. She liked that.

After they had hung up, Nathan held Pop’s handkerchief under the nightstand light and shifted it slowly over the prongs of
his fingers. He thought about what an odd, loving pair Pop and Ellen had made. With Ellen, Pop had been childlike, knotting
his handkerchief into animal shapes, manipulating it as a shadow puppet. With her, he’d been a prankster, tugging her hair
and pretending someone else had done it. Nathan had envied their ease with each other, though God knows how she’d ever understood
Pop’s heavily accented English. That she didn’t know a word of Yiddish hadn’t mattered at all when they had played the card
game
pisha paysha,
laughing themselves silly for hours.

The last time Ellen had mentioned playing pisha paysha was at Pop’s funeral. He had given the eulogy because Pop hadn’t wanted
a rabbi. In the hospital he’d said, “My whole life I kept those parasites away from me. They’re not going to get me after
I go.” After his death, Nathan had closed himself off in his study and tried to find a suitable inroad to the map of his father’s
life. He worked all night, but by dawn he was terrified the ideas he’d written down would not come together when he got up
to speak. By the time he’d arrived at the funeral hall, his fear had made him manic. Who had he been fooling, thinking he
could suddenly speak extemporaneously after a lifetime of memorizing all his addresses, word for word, to give his audience
an impression of ease and jocularity?

Every face in the hall had lifted when he’d stepped forward to speak, as if certain that Isaac Leiber’s Harvard-professor
son would give his father a eulogy to remember. He had watched those faces bloom with astonishment as he’d used the words
unformed, uneducated,
and
dogmatic
to describe his father. Soon after, the expressions of people he loved had withered with embarrassment and disappointment.
They stared dejectedly into their laps.